EdWin 100 Themes
by Tobu Ishi
Summary: A colorful mixed bag of beansized fanfics for the EdWin lover who feels like a little snack. Fluff, angst, humor, drama, and many other assorted flavors! Most rated K, but may range up to T or even M. 90 posted out of 100!
1. Theme 1: Childhood Friend

_Given my tendency to get wrapped up in great epics, I thought it would be fun to have something that I could use up all my little rootless plot bunnies in. Hence, when my dear friend hikari-san started the RoyAi 100 Themes, I thought I would give the EdWin set a shot, since I'm more into that pairing. _

These are going to be kind of unpolished compared to my usual work, for the most part; they're going to be spontaneous and fun, something to loosen me up and to have some casual fun with. I'm going to range them between 100 (true "drabble" length) and 500 words each. I hope they're enjoyable!

**EDWARD/WINRY 100 THEMES**

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Theme 1 – Childhood Friend

"…and here's Nelly and her mother," she was saying from her seat on the floor, tracing the tip of her finger over the waxy surface of the aging photograph. "Remember when their cow won first place at the summer fair?"

Sprawled on the sofa, he craned his neck to look over Winry's shoulder at the battered old album. Fading pieces of their shared past were tucked carefully away within its pages, glued in place with careful precision. Trust a mechanic to set her photos at neat right angles, efficiently labeled with names and dates.

"Oh, look, it's Michael from down the valley!" she exclaimed, turning a page with a heavy rustle and pointing to the face of a cheerfully smiling boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old with a thatch of brown hair. Edward frowned.

"Don't remember him," he said, puzzled. "How'd we know him?"

Winry's smile was bright with mischief at the memory. "Oh, Granny used to buy apples from his family's orchards. I don't know if you ever met him." She laughed. "I had such a crush on him for a while. I used to beg Granny to make pie so that we would run out of apples faster."

When Ed didn't laugh, she tilted her head back to give him a frown. "What?"

"Nothing," Edward muttered, glaring at the sofa cushions. "You liked that kid?" he added when she wouldn't stop frowning expectantly at him.

Winry snorted, shifting slightly for a better look at him as she leaned against the couch. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Ed. It was a childhood crush. Don't tell me you never had any."

"Not really," Edward said, and she threw up her hands in exasperation.

"Honestly, Ed! You're hopeless," she said, and went back to her trek through the past, murmuring names aloud as she leafed through page after page.

He waited until she was absorbed again before adding, too softly for her to hear and turn to see his slight blush, "Just you."


	2. Theme 2: Family

**Theme 2 – Family**

A lot of idle chattering went on between Winry and her grandmother while they worked on automail, and the projects and topics varied daily. Today's project was finishing the casing on a commissioned leg; the topic of conversation was families.

"I bet Al will have plenty of kids," Pinako said, tightening a screw and grinning. "He'd be tickled to have a tribe to play with."

"With half a dozen cats on top of that," Winry added with a giggle. "He's going to have to find quite the wife."

The conversation paused as she passed the soldering torch to Pinako, careful not to knock anything off of the cluttered worktable they shared.

"And you? What are your plans, Winry?"

Winry laughed incredulously. "Plans? I'm only fifteen, Granny."

"Not too young to start thinking about your future," Pinako said, shrugging. Winry snorted and shoved her hair out of her way as she leaned in close to check the alignment on two plates before bolting them down.

"Well…I'd like kids someday, I suppose. I always figured I'd live here when I grew up, but I'd like to do some traveling first, before I settle down. After that…" She thought a moment, fishing for the right bolt in a slightly rusted can of mixed odds and ends. "One child. Maybe two. At least one girl, if it was up to me, though I guess I'll have to take what I get, huh?"

Pinako's answer was an affirmative grunt; she had several bolts held between her teeth. They worked in silence for a few moments, and then Pinako gave the last nut in the row a quick tightening and reached for the torch again.

"And Ed?" she asked, and Winry dropped the can of screws she'd just picked up.

"Sorry!" she sputtered, dropping to her knees to grab for them as they scattered across the floor.

Pinako made an annoyed little noise and went to help her. "Careful, child! We'll be finding those under the counters for weeks!" She sighed and dropped a handful of screws into the can Winry held out. "As I was saying, where do you think Ed will end up?"

"Oh," Winry said, the light dawning. "I don't know," she shrugged. "Ed'll probably never stop wandering. If he does…maybe a house in Central? Then he could be right by the libraries."

"No family?" Pinako asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Ugh, how many screws can fit in one can?" Winry muttered, still gathering up the mess. "What a nuisance. Where did you find these ones with the funny heads, anyway, Granny? I don't think I've seen this type before."

The conversation turned to mechanics, saving Winry the trouble of puzzling out why it was so hard to imagine Edward with a family. Perhaps it was the problem of imagining a time when she and Pinako would not be the only girls in his life.

At fifteen, the idea of becoming a permanent part of that family hadn't occurred. It would come, in time.


	3. Theme 3: Remembrance

**Theme 3 – Remembrance**

Aquroya as Edward remembered it was a bustling city, bright with promise, like colorful wallpaper over the rotting walls of an aging house. Seven years later, he stepped off the train out of curiosity, and regretted it the moment he saw the empty skeleton streets, built up relentlessly over the rising water with a kind of stubborn desperation by inhabitants too tied to their vanishing home to leave.

Floating junk dredged up by the currents out of hundreds of abandoned homes swirled in the water beneath them as they passed over the rickety wooden paths, nailed between what had once been the highest spires of the island city.

Winry stopped once, to kneel at the edge and stretch down to rescue a water-bloated doll, whose head was knocking rhythmically against a wooden piling with the soft lapping of the water that cradled it.

When she held it out to him, he pressed his palms together and touched it without being asked, and the water and filth rose from it in a cloud of dirty steam.

Winry shuddered, holding it close and looking out over the silent tangle of waterlogged arches and towers. "It really is a dead city, isn't it? Or dying, at least. It's...tragic."

"I don't see the point in making a fuss now," Ed said with a shrug. "I've seen cities that were destroyed in a night. They've known this was coming for years. Haven't they had time to get used to the idea?"

His traveling companion's eyes were dark with memory. "That's odd, coming from you," Winry said quietly. "You of all people should know what it's like to watch what you love slipping away."

Ed started to answer, hesitated, then fell silent. The two of them gazed out across the water for a brief eternity, and then Winry felt his human hand slip into hers.

He said nothing, but he didn't have to. They stood there together, two orphans in the bosom of a dying mother, and watched the sun sink past the bloody horizon.


	4. Theme 4: Dog

Theme 4 – Dog

He was not the one who heard the weak, frantic whimpering from the bushes while they were playing in the woods. That was Nelly, with her ears tuned to animals' distress after years of living on a farm.

He was not the one who ran through the underbrush, crying out for their parents in a torn and terrified voice. That was her, with her hair stuck wet to her face with tears and her hands scratched bloody from shoving brambles aside.

He was not the one who sat waiting for help and holding the bleeding dog's head in his lap, stroking its ears and murmuring to it in a soft sing-song voice. That was Alphonse, with his natural talent for comforting others in their pain, whether they were two- or four-legged friends.

He was not the one who pried apart the cruel teeth of the bear trap, broad hands as steady and skilled with the tools as they had ever been at the operating table. That was her father, telling her to stand back and sighing with relief as the awful thing fell to pieces.

He was not the one who gently pulled aside a fold of furry skin to slip in the needle that made the pain retreat. That was her mother, gently sponging away the clotted blood and filth and bundling what was left of the leg in soft white bandages.

He was not the one who lifted the unconscious animal onto an old doubled-up sheet and carried it home with the same care he would have given to one of his children. That was Nelly's father, who knew and respected the worth of life, both animal and human.

And he was not the one who trotted halfway across Resembool to shout righteous abuse at a careless trapper twice her height and half her age, who shrank back into his house with frightened promises to never use those outdated torture machines again. That was her granny, patting the sleeping dog's head and already making plans for a special automail leg.

But when all had gone quiet that night and she was curled in a tiny miserable ball next to her poor broken pet as it slept under the weight of the drugs in a basket next to the stove, it was Edward who snuck out of the house and across the road in the pale blue moonlight to sit next to her and let her soak his shirt with her tears. And she would never forget how freely he had given her that, the only thing he had to give. 


	5. Theme 5: Library

**Theme 5 – Library**

Will she ever get used to these high echoing arches, and the way they catch the sound of her footsteps on the marble floor and toss them back down to her, muffled on the way by the rows upon rows of shelved books stretching floor to ceiling and perfuming the air with the smell of aging paper and binding glue? Winry always feels small in the Central Library, a thin-skinned caterpillar inching across the floor of a cathedral, erected to honor saints whose names she never learned. She frowns uneasily as she walks among the banks of regimented shelves. It's a relief when she reaches one of the two places here that she considers familiar and friendly.

The other is, of course, the section on mechanics, tucked at the back under a balcony that shields her from the massive height of the ceiling. She can burrow through those books for hours, sitting contentedly upside down and backwards in a library armchair with her ankles propped on the backrest and her hair cascading over the edge of the seat cushion to pool on the floor, a tome held overhead in both hands to rain down the latest theories and designs on her like blessings.

This row is larger, and more spacious, with its own proper reading nook instead of just a few old armchairs left in the rows between the shelves. It takes her a moment to find him; he's got mercurial habits, following a trail through the information on these shelves until there are books scattered haphazard across the floor in heaps, pages fanned out to show the concentric geometric lines of arrays. One never knows where he's going to end up by evening. She once found him perched on a ladder twenty feet above her head, flipping his way through a lapful of books too heavy to bother carrying down to the floor. She didn't notice him at all until he wadded up a blank page from the little book where he'd been scribbling notes and threw it at her. It missed, hitting the floor several feet away, and as she was looking around in confusion he tried throwing the notebook instead, which bounced off her head with an explosion of stars. Her subsequent explosion of temper required two librarians to restrain her and convince Edward it was safe to come down again.

Tonight her search ends at a heap of books in the corner where two shelves meet. He's asleep there, sprawled half-buried among the pages, his hair fanning softly across the thick leather tome that he's using as an impromptu pillow. She smiles and kneels to brush a few strands of hair out of his mouth. If she is a caterpillar in this temple of ancients, she thinks, then he's a golden-winged moth; as tiny as she is, but capable of flying up into the vaults as easily as a ray of sunlight.

"Wake up, Ed," she murmurs, shaking his shoulder lightly. "Time to go home."


	6. Theme 6: Always right

**Theme 6 – Always right**

Her eyebrows are pursed together in dismay as she surveys the mess in front of her, setting aside the newly-detached cover grill with a clank. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Ed," Winry mutters, already reaching for wiresnips and tweezers. "How do you manage to do these things? I'm going to have to rewire half of this, the insulation is completely ruined…"

She continues to mutter to herself, leaning close to pick out the fragments of sand driven into every crevice of the inside of his arm.

Ed sighs. It was a stupid mistake, really. The grill worked its way loose after one too many transmutations into his usual blade, and his latest mission ended with him fighting his way through a miniature alchemical whirlwind of sand and dirt. His arm didn't give out until three days later, as the gritty stuff that got into the casing chewed its way slowly through the rubber insulation on the wires, eventually short-circuiting everything from the elbow down.

"…such an idiot…" he hears Winry grumbling. He's noticed she only really explodes over the life-threatening damage. The rest of the time it's just a long string of irritated insults, dissecting every stupid thing he's done to her masterwork, as she recognizes sign after sign of poor maintenance and neglect scratched into the metal.

Closing his eyes, he remembers Maria Ross's concerned face hovering beside his hospital bed after the fifth-laboratory incident, as he worked his way through another tasteless dinner.

"You try so hard to be strong," his escort had commented, watching him struggle to finish the meal. "For your brother…for those you work with in the military…even for the people you help on your travels. You can't afford to let down that guard of yours for even a minute. Isn't it…difficult, having to be always right?"

The tweezers clink in an irritated rhythm against the edge of the access hatch, harmonizing with the steady ting-ting-ting of bits of sand hitting the dish where Winry is collecting them, with a pause now and then as she snips away length after length of unsalvageable wire. Ed smiles slightly and leans back in his chair, basking in her perfectly truthful accusations.

"…could have just double-checked the grill once or twice a month, but nooo…"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he says at last, as she cuts away the last of the ruined wires and tosses it in the trash. "You're right. I'll be more careful, okay?"

Winry gives him a suspicious little frown, but nods and reaches for the oil, tapping careful drops into his sand-blasted joints. Ed settles back and relaxes, ready for a long wait and not especially minding.

She may think he's a reckless, brainless fool…but Ed will never take for granted this peculiar luxury she gives him: to simply, and without consequence, be wrong.


	7. Theme 7: It's kind of a fight

**Theme 7 – It's kind of a fight…**

"I said, you're not coming," Ed insisted for the eighth time, setting his battered leather suitcase on the kitchen floor to turn and glare at Winry where she stood calmly behind him, a canvas duffel bag slung over her shoulder.

"We've been over this, Ed," she said, with a too-patient sigh. "You're not the only one who can't stand being cooped up in Liesenburg any more. I've heard enough stories from you boys. I want to see some of these places before I settle down."

"I don't think so," Ed growled, crossing his arms. "You know me, Winry, I'm a magnet for trouble. It's too dangerous. Stay home."

It was the wrong thing to say. Winry's eyes flashed, and she let the duffel slip to the floor with a thump, taking a few brisk steps towards him. Edward's stubborn bravado slipped somewhat, and he shrank back a step...

But instead of diving for a wrench, Winry pushed her left sleeve back, holding out her arm for him to see.

"Two years ago," she said, rattling it off like a statistic. "A barfight in Rush Valley. Some drunken thug wanted me to work on something other than his automail."

Ed squinted at her forearm, realized for the first time that there were several pale, ragged scars running across it. Before he could say anything, Winry dropped her sleeve and pulled up the hem of her shirt, exposing her lower ribs and a few whitish puckers between them.

"Three years and two months ago," she said. "Paninya got in a scrape with some rowdy tourists and I had to step in and help. We laid 'em out on their asses." She chuckled, tracing her fingertips over the marks.

Ed's jaw had long since dropped. "You've been getting in fights!"

Winry's answer was to tug down the zipper of her shirt a few inches and pull it open on one side to show him a stretched, pinkish burn mark that spread over her collarbone.

"Eighteen months ago," she said, grimly. "Some two-bit alchemist, swindling a town near Rush Valley by…pretending to be you."

Ed stared. "You took on an alchemist?"

"I think he's still got wrench-marks in his skull," Winry said. "My aim, as it turns out, is just as good on fake Elrics." There was a whisper of something bitter behind her eyes, and he wondered what it had done to her, thinking maybe he'd returned only to find some bozo masquerading under his name…

"I guess you've been a bad influence," Winry said, her smile turning flippant. "So, what do you think?"

"I think," Ed said, looking at his old friend with new eyes, "that you need somebody with some common sense to keep you out of trouble, you public menace."

"Well, that rules you out, then," Winry scoffed. "Unless you're planning on going off to menace the public together?"

Picking up his suitcase, Ed grinned broadly.

"Amestris will never know what hit it."


	8. Theme 8: No problem

**Theme 8 – No problem**

He's curled in a miserable ball, hidden in the reeds, when she wades over with a little bundle of wet red cloth in her hand.

"Ed?" she calls, and follows the sound of him squirming further into the water at her approach.

Looking around, she sees a few reeds quiver, and heads toward them.

"I know you're back there, dummy."

"Leave me alone!" It's a peevish little hiccup of a shout.

She giggles. "Don't you want your trunks back? I fished 'em out for you."

There's a pause, and then a small, muddy hand pokes its way out of the long grasses.

"Don't you dare peek."

Winry wrinkles her nose in disgust. "Oh, yuck, Ed," she scolds him, edging close enough to slap the wet fabric into his hand, which whisks away behind the reeds again. "That's gross. I don't want cooties."

"Oh, thanks a lot," he mutters. The reeds wave wildly now, and she waits patiently, tracing patterns in the running water with her fingertips.

"What?" she complains. "You're a boy, aren't you? I didn't look in the first place," she hurries to add. Ed is usually exempt from the category of cootie-carrying boys, but the danger multiplied tenfold the minute his swim trunks bobbed to the surface sans occupant.

"Well, good," Ed grumbles, emerging from the reeds all smeared with river mud from hiding in the shallows, his trunks cinched tightly around his waist. "I'm going home."

Winry blinks. "How come?"

"I can't go back out there now!" Ed insists hotly. "They're gonna laugh at me more!"

"Oh, for pete's sake, Ed," Winry says, hands on her hips. "If they do I'll punch 'em in the nose."

"You'll get in trouble," Ed says, since being defended by a girl is sissy stuff but telling her so would put his nose on the receiving end of that punch. "I'm just gonna go home."

Winry wrinkles her nose. "Fine," she says, "but I'm coming with."

"If you want." It's a casual acceptance, since it's just as sissy to want a sympathetic companion with whom to trudge the soggy road of disgrace. Al's still having a good time, and he doesn't want to ruin that by dragging him off early just because his big brother was a snorking idiot today.

As they clamber up over the bank of the river, bare feet sinking thickly in the mud, she slings a companionable arm around his shoulders. "I thought it was a great cannonball," she tells him cheerfully. "Nobody else swung half as high on that dumb old rope."

"Nobody else lost their shorts," he grumbles, and she smothers her giggle as they turn their steps homeward. Ed's dignity is a fragile thing, after all.

"Aw, it was no big deal," she says instead, and he manages a bit of a smile.

"Thanks, Winry."

She smiles back. "No problem."


	9. Theme 9: Only

**Theme 9 – Only**

The last light of evening is fading golden between the mountains to the west, and she stands watching it from the doorway with an unlit candle in her hand. The wind rushes past and ruffles her hair against her cheek, sending a shiver down her back through the thin fabric of her shirt, but she doesn't turn to go inside.

Not yet.

Her eyes are fixed on the point on the horizon where the road dips out of sight. It's barely visible by now, a slightly darker ribbon against the dusky curve of the hillside, winding its way through the flat fields and then up the hill like a stepladder to the cool eternity of the darkening night sky.

He's out there somewhere, she believes. Paying his night at some faraway inn with the work of two hands pressed swiftly together and down, perhaps, or dozing in a tangle of limbs, metal and flesh, on the plush seat of a softly swaying train speeding through the darkness. Or even standing in a doorway, somewhere, gazing with those sunbright eyes at some distant dim horizon, the curve of his cheek lit softly by the same arch of velvet sky.

He's not dead. She somehow can't believe it, no matter what they've stamped on his record in Central. They gave up too quickly, those military idiots. It's only been a year. She takes her waiting day by day, and each day is a new star of hope.

Her fingers curl around the splintery wood of the match in her pocket, and she strikes it against the doorframe, setting it to the candle wick with care and watching as the little blue-orange flame sputters and melts away the wax. The wick catches and chars brown, then black, brightening the shadows that have grown up around her.

She gives a last plaintive look to the empty horizon, then sets the candle carefully inside the lantern hung on the outside wall, swinging the tiny door shut on well-oiled metal hinges. It will wait for him here while she sleeps, safe from the wind.

She is careful to close the front door tightly behind her. There's no reason to be disappointed. He'll come over that horizon, one of these days.

She'll wait as long as it takes him. After all, it's only another day.


	10. Theme 10: Love or like?

**Theme 10 – Love or like?**

"Do you love her?" Al asked him once, during one of his and Winry's rare visits to Dublith. Ed choked on his bite of fish, coughing spasmodically, and it took several good whacks on the back and a swig of water out of a contritely offered canteen to get him breathing again.

When things had calmed down, the brothers sat gazing out across the lake again, dangling their legs over the edge of the cliff, while Ed thought over the question carefully. If Winry had been there with them, he might have answered differently; but she understood her old friends and their close bond very well, and had stayed behind at Izumi's to make herself useful at the butcher shop, while the brothers caught up on things with a few days' trip to Jack Island.

So it was just Al and him, and he could afford to be perfectly honest without causing himself any trouble. For that matter, ten years ago the question would have been much more loaded; but Al's childhood crush on Winry had mellowed into a simpler, fiercely loyal affection. The worst he could expect if Al didn't like his answer was a punch in the face, and that was normal, and quite tolerable compared to the guilt of possibly breaking his brother's far-too-tender heart.

The sun sank toward the horizon and the waves beat a slow, soft rhythm against the shore as they sat in companionable silence, gnawing their roasted fish down to the bones. Ed thought over the last twenty-something years, from childhood play, to the searing pain and absolute trust of automail surgery, to the uncountable hours of teasing and talking over repairs, to the years of loneliness in another world, missing her smile as much as the limbs she'd given him. He weighed her bossiness and selfishness and eccentricity and occasional bouts of violence, against her cheerfulness and natural empathy and mechanical genius and the way her fingers lingered in his hair when she kissed him. And he thought of the utter contentment of knowing that, when this trip was over and they paddled their boat back to the shore, she would be waiting for him, ready to set out on their travels again. Together.

"Yeah," he said at last, tossing the stick that held the remains of his dinner into the lakewater that moved sunset-red below them, and turned to his brother with a smile. "You know, I think I do."


	11. Theme 11: Is it okay to cry?

**Theme 11 – "Is it okay to cry?"**

The problem was not that Edward never cried.

Winry had watched him cry after his mother's death until he had no tears left and the sobs came dry and hard and shook his small frame like the ravages of a disease. She'd seen him weeping brokenly after they'd survived her kidnapping, his hands over his eyes as if he could blot out a world where madmen stole children and sliced them apart in front of each other, feeding on their fear. It was her hand that wiped away the tears that squeezed grudgingly from his tightly-shut eyes, while the calibrating jolts rocked his nerves until they burned raw and he convulsed helplessly on the surgical table. And she heard clearly the tears choking at the back of his throat as he screamed his fury at the well-meaning friends who had kept the secret of Hughes' death from him.

No, the problem was not that Edward didn't cry. But his tears were always in and of the moment, a violent outpouring that occurred only when his emotions had swelled to the overflowing point. Edward cried openly and freely, but if given the chance to think first, he swallowed his tears, forcing them back down to distill inside him like the poisonous stone he was pouring his life into finding.

And that was what frightened Winry. Not the streaked and swollen face that followed his mother's death, but the exhausted and grimly calm one that he presented at her funeral, clutching his brother's hand and staring at nothing. Edward bottled up his grief until it forced its way free in those rare moments of mindless shock, bursting out in an explosion of pent-up stress and anger and pain, so that he cried until he could hardly breathe and then wiped his face and tucked down the corners of his dignity and started the whole destructive process over again.

She hated it, and that was why she cried for him, hoping that something in her tears would release the pain perpetually building inside him. He did it to be strong, she knew; to put on a brave face for Alphonse, and to keep himself safe from a world that preyed on the small and the weak. He was already small, bless his poor heart. He could not afford to be weak, and she knew it. But she could at least show him her own weakness; and perhaps someday he would understand.

With her, he was safe.

And with her, it was okay to cry.


	12. Theme 12: Lucky charm

**Theme 12 – Lucky charm**

He picked it off the sidewalk in a moment of confusion, matching it to the other screws in his arm with a puzzled frown. It was still wet with ice water from the truck that had taken her away. The sun glinted from its curved head like a bright spark, setting off a leap of logic that saved her life.

He tucked it in his pocket before he ran off in hot pursuit of her, and later when he was tied helpless and bleeding among the slaughtered pigs, he stretched shaking fingers out to pull it free, forcing himself to scratch the array slowly into his metal bonds with its sharp tip, as fear hammered wild and sour at the back of his throat.

When all was over and done and he'd cried himself empty on the steps outside and slept the sleep of the broken in a borrowed bed, he dragged himself back there, ducking under the layers of police tape and walking among the frozen carcasses until he reached the spot where his blood still spattered the floor. The screw was there, too, rolled up against one of the table legs. He'd poured out his pain and fear and blood and tears to rescue the girl to whom it belonged. He picked it up gingerly, rolling it between his fingers as he left the slaughterhouse behind him like a bad dream.

He kept it in his pocket, after that day when it saved both their lives. Sometimes he took it out to roll it in his fingers again, the metal ridges calming in their familiarity, but mostly he just left it safe in his pocket, tucked in a corner where it wouldn't fall out and get lost. It remained there like a stone in his shoe, always reminding him of how useful she was to him, and how precious.


	13. Theme 13: Practical Joke

**Theme 13 – Practical joke**

The suit of armor trudged up the road, and it took Winry a moment to realize that he was alone.

She'd thrown open the window for a breath of fresh air and spotted the familiar silhouette on the horizon, glinting slightly in the summer sunlight that slanted over Risenburg's vividly green hills. Propping her elbow on the sill, she leaned out for a better look, shading her eyes and squinting as she scanned the fields for the small golden-haired figure she knew would be trailing his brother. Or running ahead of him. Or off to the side, or…?

Or nowhere. Edward wasn't there.

But…he and Al were always together…

Winry whirled around, thundering down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the front door, her bare feet pounding the dirt, shoes forgotten.

Al stepped back in alarm as she sprinted up to him, her hair loose in a tangle down her back where her kerchief had fallen away to lie in a red puddle halfway down the road.

"Where is he?" she gasped, doubled over and fighting to breathe. Al said nothing, and she pulled herself upright, glaring steely-blue up at him. "Where IS he, Al!"

"W-Winry…" Al murmured, his voice timid, holding something back…

She launched herself at him, pounding on his breastplate with panicked fists. "Dammit, Al, you tell me what happened to Ed right now or so help me I'll take you apart mys…s-self--!"

She choked and let out a stifled wail, her voice breaking up like sugar candy. Al stared down at her with the closest thing to horrified wide eyes that he could manage, and suddenly his gauntlets were fumbling open the straps to his breastplate and something inside let out a yelp as he dragged it half out by the scruff of its neck.

"Brother!" Al scolded the squirming boy in his grip furiously. "You apologize to Winry right now!"

"Oww…!" Ed cried, struggling helplessly, and twisted around to face Winry's stricken gaze. Ed's face fell as he saw the tears in her eyes. "Look, Winry, it was just a stupid joke, you always get so mad when I break my arm and I thought—"

Her fist connected solidly with his face, sending him reeling back into Al again with a clang of metal. After a stunned second, he managed to sit up again, wincing.

"Okay," he said, checking his teeth with the tip of his tongue to make sure they were all still there. "I deserved tha—"

His voice cut off for the second time as her arms went around him, pulling him so close he could feel the hammering of her heart.

"Don't you ever…ever…do that to me again, Edward Elric," Winry whispered fiercely against his hair, and Ed hesitated, then nodded, too startled to say a word…

Then she drew back, and he carefully climbed to the ground.

"C'mon, you moron," she muttered fondly, ruffling up his hair. "I think there's some fresh pie in the kitchen."


	14. Theme 14: Just Between Us

**Theme 14 – Confrontation/Just Between Us**

"…Fullmetal, are you listening to me?"

Edward blinked, jerking out of his doze. "Yeah, yeah, political whatever. Are we done yet?"

Mustang's elegant brows drew together in irritation.

"May I remind you, Fullmetal, that this report is a required duty of your station as a State Alchemist, and that shirking it in any manner is grounds for a withdrawal of your license?"

Ed crossed his arms sullenly. "Colonel, with you, everything is grounds for a withdrawal."

Mustang smothered a smirk. "Indeed," he merely said. "Now then, one more issue and we'll be finished. You are of course aware that your medical well-being is of utmost importance to the State?"

Ed snorted derisively at that, but said nothing.

"And as a minor under the State's employ, I am required as your superior to pursue certain lines of inquiry, in the interest of your health."

"What's this leading up to?" Ed asked suspiciously.

Mustang smiled. This should be entertaining.

"Just between us, Fullmetal," he asked, "how far have you progressed in your relationship with Miss Rockbell?"

There was a brief moment of peace before the implications sank in; and then Ed's eyes went as round as a pair of coins.

"WHAAAAAAT!"

The office door banged open, and Havoc and Fury's heads popped in.

"What's going on?" Fury asked nervously.

"Just a routine inquiry. Fullmetal, I haven't heard your answer."

Edward spluttered for a moment, then managed to yell, "Dammit, she's just my mechanic!"

Havoc's eyebrows migrated towards his hairline. "Ahh, the Rockbell girl again."

Mustang's grin expanded. He had an audience now—time to really push Ed's buttons. "Hm…a mechanic's hands, Fullmetal? Interesting."

Ed was turning a fascinating shade of purple. "She's just a friend!"

A large, bald head appeared in the doorway.

"Edward Elric!" Armstrong bellowed. "What is all this noise I hear?"

"Ah, Major Armstrong," Mustang smiled. "We were just discussing the nature of Fullmetal's association with Miss Rockbell."

"A fine young lady!" Armstrong exclaimed, nodding impressively. "Congratulations, young man! This is the springtime of your life! Why, I remember when I was your age…"

Edward went from purple to green.

At that moment, the men in the doorway scattered, as Hawkeye bustled in with a large stack of papers. "Are you feeling all right, Edward?" she asked briskly, setting them on Mustang's desk. "You look rather flushed."

"Erm…" Edward mumbled.

Mustang grinned. "Now, Fullmetal, you know of course that if you need any supplies, the medical center can always—"

"NO!" Edward had had it. "No supplies! No springtime! No…associations! You're all a bunch of perverts and he," Ed pointed accusingly at Mustang, "is your chief!" With that he stormed past the watching military staff and out the front door.

Mustang sighed. "Do you think I overdid it, Lieutenant?"

"Perhaps a little, Sir," Hawkeye murmured.

"I'm sure he'll bounce back. You'll notice, Lieutenant," he added calmly as he reached for the stack of papers, "that Fullmetal never did answer my question."

And to that, Hawkeye had nothing to say.


	15. Theme 15: Worry

**Theme 15 – Worry**

Back when they were still searching for the Stone, he and Al used to talk late at night, when sleep hovered at the edges of their consciousness like a road they couldn't quite cross. Sometimes they spoke of memories, things they'd lost but would never forget; and sometimes, heartbreakingly, Al would ask him little things, making it an innocent part of the conversation, trying to hide the fact that he'd forgotten them.

It was a normal thing, Ed told him then. As the mind gets older, new memories crowd out some of the old. It's nothing dangerous, nothing abnormal. Nothing bad.

And Al would nod, and try to hide his fear and worry as the little details slipped away over the years of sight without touch and taste and smell. The slight biting cinnamon aftertaste of apple pie. The heady fragrance of summer flowers. The feel of another human being's arms around him.

Ed tried his best to sympathize, knew how horrible it must be. But he never really understood until that morning, when he woke up in bed after a night of hazy, grey-water dreams and realized that, after two long years trapped on this side of the Gate, he was no longer quite sure of the exact blue of her eyes.

He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, straining to remember, to be sure. Something gnawed at his stomach, and he wondered how much more he had already forgotten without knowing it. An irrational worry, with a grain of truth in it that made him want to stay curled in his bed forever, for fear that every glimpse of the streets of Europe would cancel out another fragment of his home. That he would watch her vanish from his memory in pieces, each strand of her straw-pale hair fading one by one.

It was a bitter sort of fear.


	16. Theme 16: From now on, too

**Theme 16 – From now on, too**

He looks so little in the bed that it scares her. Ed's always been kind of small, she knows that, Al outgrew him last year and he's as skinny as a stick, but with two limbs missing he's tiny, a fragile bundle of bandages with dull yellow hair spilling out the top.

She puts down the basin of water on a chair and goes to him, smoothing his bangs out of his eyes. He's fast asleep, drugged up to his eyeballs after the first round of surgery. The skin and muscle has been prepped and peeled away and pinned, and now waits, swathed in bandages to keep it clean and sop up the fluid that seeps from freshly-cauterized flesh. Tomorrow they'll install the cradles, bolting them down securely while he drifts under the anesthetic.

It will be the next day, after the painkillers and drowsiness wear off and every nerve is wide awake and trembling, that the hard part will begin.

Dipping a cloth into the cool water, she folds it and lays it across his eyes. Droplets run down the sides of his face like tears and soak into the pillow. It's going to be so rough on him, she knows. He's always been the brave one, climbing down the rocks to the river and catching snakes by the neck, the first one to the top of the tree that spreads its branches over the roof of his house. (She was the second by a narrow margin, which she's rather proud of, though poor Al froze halfway up and they had to talk him down again)

She's watched this surgery break down grown men until they sob and thrash at their bonds and beg them to stop. She doesn't think Ed will do that, but she knows it won't help if she's scared too. Granny is always very brisk when she works on patients. She says it gives them something solid and constant to hold on to.

Winry looks at her old friend's sleeping face, bloodlessly pale and washed out by the brightness of his hair, and then closes her eyes and makes a promise to herself. Ed has always been the brave one. From now on, if they're going to get through this, she has to be the brave one, too.


	17. Theme 17: Memo

**Theme 17 – Memo**

The train is swaying like a cradle, and it's been a long day, so it's no surprise that Ed has pillowed his head on the broad curve of his brother's leg and dozed off. Al's used to this by now, and sits carefully still, gazing out the window with one large gauntlet resting lightly on his brother's shoulder. The rise and fall of his sleepy breathing is unusually peaceful; Al wonders if it's because they're going home.

There is a jarring bump as their car rattles over a join in the tracks, and Ed's head jostles slightly against the armor. He makes a grumbling noise and squirms in his sleep, curling his arm toward him to rest it on the seat instead of dangling over the edge. The cuff of his sleeve is drawn back a bit by the movement, and Al's curiosity flares as he sees a scribble of ink on the inside of his brother's wrist.

Huge leather gloves aren't made for precision, but he's done enough painstaking chalking of the tiny details of arrays to build up a surprising amount of fine motor control. Careful not to wake him, he pulls his brother's sleeve back just a bit, wondering why on earth he would be writing on himself, and what on earth he would write.

Scrawled in large letters is TICKETS, presumably for the train; under that in smaller, faded letters is _report_, as if he couldn't stand to write it firmly; and under that are a few alchemical symbols that Al recognizes as shorthand for some raw minerals and metals that he and his brother picked up at the market the day before.

At the bottom, written in neat round letters, is **winry**.

No explanation, no elaboration. Al looks at the name for a moment, wondering what longer sentence it represents. Buy Winry a souvenir? Call Winry and tell her we're coming? Brace for Winry's wrath when she finds out you've lost three bolts on your upper arm and most of a finger? Ask Winry about upgrades?

Something more personal?

The train whistle blasts, and Ed rolls over, muttering something about elemental compounds as his hand slips out of his brother's grasp and ends up tucked against the back of the seat. Al decides not to ask; it's Edward's business anyway, and he feels a little guilty for peeking at the list of reminders, even written somewhere as public as his own arm.

Quietly, he settles back in his seat and lets the world fade for now. Whatever Ed meant by scribbling her name across his wrist, they'll be seeing her soon. For the two of them, that's the important part.


	18. Theme 18: Calendar

**Theme 18 – Calendar**

She's only seventeen, and already she lives her life by the calendar, every square running over with carefully scribbled appointments and dates. Life in Rush Valley lives up to the frantic pace implied by the name, and her skilled repairs and inspired designs are in huge demand after a year of living and studying here, so that she can hardly keep up with the number of requests for consultation that pour in at the door of Dominic's shop.

The old man doesn't mind; he gruffly says that if they'd rather see a pretty young thing than an old grizzlebeard like him, there's no helping their common sense, but the large hand he rests on her shoulder speaks of his growing respect. And Paninya laughs irrepressibly as usual, sits on the counter swinging her mechanical legs and flicks bolts at the backs of the heads of the young men who occasionally pry something loose in their arms or legs to have an excuse to visit the petite mechanic with the spirited blue eyes.

Life has been more interesting at Dominic's shop since Winry arrived, there's no denying it. It's come to the point where she has to note everything onto that neat grid of days, just to make sure she doesn't forget anything. Al's visits and Granny's demands to come home for a bit are sandwiched between tune-ups and replacements and fitting appointments and lunch with Paninya and her own regular visits to Central to sip tea with Gracia and Scieszka and play toy doctor to Elysia's menagerie of broken playthings. But there are some things that don't have a specific date, and you can't write them neatly down in a square under a seven-o'clock rewiring appointment and expect them to come true.

No one in Rush Valley ever asks why the initials "**E.E**." are always written in the bottom right corner of each new month. Mechanics have their eccentricities like anyone else. If they ever did ask, she would simply tell them it's a reminder. No matter how full her calendar gets, she's always waiting for that one phone call. Ready to drop everything, to make this one appointment.


	19. Theme 19: Relaxation

**Theme 19 – Relaxation**

The phone rang five times before someone finally picked up, and Russell found himself vaguely irritated by the time the distant, tinny voice answered, "Hello?"

"Hey, Elric," he said, careful not to gripe. Fletcher had been after him lately for 'being too grouchy', which was apparently his younger brother's euphemism for the stress inherent in the final stages of far-reaching alchemical endeavors. "Thought I'd drop you a line and let you know about the latest findings."

"F-findings?" Ed stammered, and Russell rolled his eyes.

"Yes, Elric, the findings. You know, the alchemical project we've been collaborating on for the last year or three?"

He tapped his fingers impatiently on his desk. Ed's answer sounded strangely disjointed.

"Oh, right…sorry, Tringham, I—_aah_!—wasn't expecting your call…"

It was an unusually sharp yelp, even for Ed. Had he stepped on a tack or something over there?

"You all right, Elric?"

"Fine, I'm…I'm fine, uh…" There was another odd little pause, and then, "Look, Tringham, could you call me back later? I'm a little busy right now…"

Russell quirked an eyebrow. Inconvenient, to say the least, but there wasn't much Russell could say to that. "Fine by me," he said, resisting the urge to toss his neatly written report across the room. "What time?"

"Maybe tomo-_whoa!"_

Russell tapped the earpiece on his phone, puzzled. "Ed? You still there?"

"Uh, yeah…tomorrow evening, okay?"

"That's fine," Russell said. "Talk to you then."

About to hang up, he remembered something.

"Oh, by the way, congratulations on your wedding," he added. "Sorry I couldn't make it last week, but one of us had to keep an eye on the project. I don't trust those novices they dredged up as assistants for us."

"Thanks," Ed said. "Talk to you la-"

The phone cut out. Russell joggled the switch a few times, then sighed and hung up. Inexcusable rudeness, really. He would give his research partner an earful when he next saw him.

After all, what on earth was more pressing business than one of the biggest alchemical experiments of their time?

-o-

"Winry…!" Ed hissed furiously. "That was Tringham!"

"Too bad for him, then," Winry said, cheerfully unapologetic. Ed was still glaring at her, though, so she leaned over to playfully kiss the corner of his mouth, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

"It's very rude to interrupt others," she murmured against his cheek, ignoring the hypocrisy of her own wandering fingers mid-phone call. "And you're really wound up too tight, Edward Elric. Taking business calls on your honeymoon? Honestly."

"Tringham probably thinks honeymoons are something you spread on toast," Ed muttered grimly. Draping her arms around his shoulders, Winry kissed her way lightly up his neck.

"All the same, work and play don't mix, you numbskull. You took this time off for some rest and relaxation, remember?" Her breath of a laugh ruffled the hair beside his ear. "I think we can at least manage some relaxation."

He really couldn't disagree with an argument like that.


	20. Theme 20: Unnecessary, unimportant

**Theme 20 – Unnecessary/Unimportant**

Scieszka disliked many things. Being ignored was high on the list, along with asparagus and binding rot. But being Winry's best maid was a serious duty, and so a very frustrated bookworm was now perched on her workbench, trying to discuss wedding plans.

Granted, Winry wasn't clueless enough to get hitched in her greasy coveralls. However, she'd never been much for the finer points of femininity. Winry's idea of jewelry was half-a-dozen stainless-steel piercings; her idea of dressing up was a plain white top and a skirt. And so it fell to Scieszka to make sure the wedding day didn't roll around before anyone even ordered flowers.

"So, ah, what kind of dress were you thinking of?" Scieszka asked, leaning over for a look at her friend's project. It looked to her like an unidentifiable mélange of weird little metal things.

Winry shrugged, not glancing up from her work. "Something pretty?" she said absently, carefully applying a pair of wire snips to the tangle.

Scieszka sighed. "I meant, what kind of design?" she asked. "Have you gone shopping yet? You went into town yesterday with your granny..."

"To pick up some connectors for this," Winry said, tapping it proudly with her screwdriver. "It's going to be fantastic, Scieszka! An electric lamp with a rechargeable power source, capable of-"

"That's, uh, great," Scieszka interrupted quickly. "Have you thought about wedding colors?"

"Wedding what?" Winry echoed, puzzled.

Scieszka made a face. Hadn't Winry ever read a bridal magazine? Even a romance novel? Scieszka had read four hundred and seventy-three, and in none of them had the heroine been this difficult. "The color scheme for the wedding, Winry. Flowers and bridesmaid dresses and decorations."

Winry blinked. "But we've just got you and Al."

"You still need wedding colors, Winry!" Scieszka complained. "Weddings are about beauty, and true love, and the inner youth and renewal of the spirit! They're supposed to be exquisite, and therefore you've got to have wedding colors!"

Putting down her screwdriver, Winry regarded her calmly, then went to the doorway. "Ed!" she yelled. "What's your favorite color?"

"Red!" he shouted back from somewhere downstairs.

"Thanks, just checking!" Winry called, walking back to her workbench. "Red'll work," she said cheerfully, and went back to her invention.

Scieszka ground her teeth. "Winry, you're being impossible," she wailed. "You can't just have one color, you need complementary shades and florist's orders and dress fittings and...and everything!"

Winry hesitated, then set down her tools again and took her friend gently by the shoulder. "Scieszka," she said, "it really doesn't matter to me what my wedding colors are. And I'm wearing my mother's wedding dress. It's a little like having her here, you know?"

Scieszka gaped at her, unsure of what to say.

"We're in love, with or without florist's orders or whatever," Winry said with a shrug. "Weddings are just the formalities. It's the rest of your lives that matters…right?"

Scieszka and her four hundred and seventy-three romance novels had nothing to add.


	21. Theme 21: Mystique

**Theme 21 – Mystique**

The streets of Rush Valley were so crowded that Winry almost didn't notice when someone jostled past her with a whisper of covetous fingers across her collarbone. Clapping her hand reflexively to her neck, Winry felt the absence of a familiar thin chain and whirled, pulling a screwdriver from her tool belt and hurling it at the back of the pickpocket's head as she slipped away into the crowd.

It hit dead center, and the woman yelped and stumbled to her knees. Diving forward, Winry twisted the woman's arm behind her back and levered her to her feet again, marching her into a side alley away from the crowds.

"Give it back," she hissed into her captive's ear. The woman chuckled dizzily.

"Quite the vigilante law enforcement you've got here," she murmured. "If I knew the little girls were this dangerous here, I would have tried Central instead."

"I said give it back!" Winry insisted, giving her a shake. In answer, the thief's hand dipped into her pocket, drawing out a plain silver locket.

"What a cheap bauble," she scoffed. "I was hoping for something really valuable to pawn." Winry growled, and she laughed. "Ah, sentimental value. Charming. Let's see what's in it, shall we?" she suggested, and flicked the catch with her thumbnail before Winry could protest. The locket opened to a photograph: a teenaged boy, blond hair in a loose ponytail, grinning broadly.

"Hey!" Winry yelped, trying to snatch the locket without letting go of her captive's arm. The woman raised an eyebrow.

"Interesting," she murmured, and suddenly her stance shifted and she slipped out of Winry's grasp as easily as water. "I suppose I owe a favor to any friend of Edward Elric," she purred, and tossed the piece of jewelry back to her. It flew through the air like a comet, trailing a glimmer of silver chain behind it, and Winry nearly dropped it in her surprise.

"You know him?" she sputtered.

The thief smiled. "Quite well, you could say. We had a bit of…business a few years ago, during his travels."

Staring at her, Winry belatedly realized that she was young and exotically lovely, with sumptuous curves. Uneasily, she curled her fingers tightly around the locket, her own skinny figure and straw-yellow hair suddenly feeling painfully ordinary.

The woman seemed amused by her discomfort. "You know what he liked best about me?" she purred, and reached for the zipper to her shirt, tugging it down to expose several inches of luxurious cleavage…

"This," she said, and pointed to the array tattooed across her chest as Winry's eyes widened in surprise. "I offered him anything he desired, and I do mean anything…and he asked for alchemical information, the silly sot."

Rolling her eyes, Psiren turned and sauntered away to melt into the crowd again, calling over her shoulder, "He's a scholar to the bone, that one. If you can get his attention and keep it, little girl, you have more mystique than I ever did."


	22. Theme 22: Unaccustomed things

**Theme 22 – Unaccustomed Things**

He has reached the uncomfortable stage now, the part that drives new patients to distraction. Surgery has been survived, and healing endured, and now it is the delicate process of learning to use what he has been given that makes him grind his teeth and clench his human fist.

Metal and muscle have met and melded and grown used to one another, and the pain is now only an occasional twinge along the line of steel and flesh, a sharp jab when he twists too far, running briefly along the ropy pinkish scars that radiate thickly from where the bolts pull at his skin. Now the hard part begins, making a headache throb deep at the base of his skull each time he slowly curls his shining new fingers around the fragile curve of a cup, or carefully levers himself out of bed, arms spread wide like a tightrope walker as he gets his balance on a foot that can't feel the soft nap of the carpet.

He underestimates the little things, like how long it will take him to put his socks on in the morning, and she comes up the stairs when breakfast is long since over to find him crouched over a torn stocking, blinking back furious tears as he tries for the hundredth time to draw it neatly over a metal foot that won't point its toes right, with a hand whose fingers love to let the slippery knit pop free.

She's seen this before, of course, but it's difficult to watch him stewing in his own stubbornness. If he asked for her help, she could give him advice gleaned from the experience of a short lifetime of assisting her grandmother's patients. But she knows he won't ask outright, and so she slips her advice to him in small undetectable doses, as brief sensible comments during tuning sessions—does the wiring in your toes respond correctly when you move it like this? she asks the next day, bending the metal digits and carefully ignoring his look of enlightenment as he realizes, Oh, so that's how you make it do that—and she is careful for now to say nothing, but instead to bring up bacon and eggs on a tray and set it silently in the doorway.

The plate will be picked clean of crumbs when she comes to fetch it later, and he will be sprawled facedown on the bed, one sock on and exhausted by his small triumph. She lets him sleep, knowing he'll need his energy for the other sock before dinner. He refuses to come downstairs barefoot. It's the principle of the thing.


	23. Theme 23: Waiting

**Theme 23 – Waiting**

Dusk has settled on this unfamiliar station, and the curve of the sky is deepest blue, twinkling with the light of the few brave and early stars that have made themselves visible through the lights of the city. He sits waiting beside his silent brother on a long wooden bench in the cooling watery air, gazing up at the night and wondering how long it will be before he sees her again.

He leaned out the window and waved to her as the train pulled out this morning, with her running alongside it down the Risenburg station platform, laughing and dodging startled pedestrians in a tradition left over from childhood. Her hair shone brightly visible in the sun, easy to follow even as the train whipped around the corner and out of sight, her hand windmilling the air as she stood at the farthest edge of the platform. He can still hear her teasing threats to come back and visit soon, even though both of them know it could be months before he and Al return again. Life is like that, these days.

If he had a choice, he would ignore the far-off whistle of their approaching train, but he has debts left to pay and favors to return, and a promise made that he can't break for the world. As it is, he should be thinking over their latest theories on the Stone, but for some reason he can't force his mind to follow the crosshatched lines of arrays tonight. Instead, he gazes into the shadows with eyes gone slightly dull.

A few papers tumble across the platform in the rising night wind, and he turns up the collar of his jacket with a shiver. Somewhere, a clock is striking the hour with clear, cool notes that hang in the air like pale green glass. Unconsciously folding and unfolding the ticket in his hands, he tilts his head back to face the emerging moon, and wonders what she's doing now.


	24. Theme 24: Ten years ago

**Theme 24 – Ten years ago**

Ed pretends not to remember it, but it was a dark day for that bedraggled and muddy six-year-old who watched his younger brother marching off with a fistful of freshly pulled dandelions and daisies to propose to their best friend. He fought tooth and nail over that particular privilege, an unusually vicious disagreement compared to their usual frequent but playful squabbles, and ended up with a faceful of dirt and a split, puffy lip by the end of it, mostly because he refused to give up after Al dumped him on his butt the first time. And the second, and the third…

Normally he would never rejoice over any misfortune of Al's, but he couldn't help feeling smug when his brother shuffled back over the hill and dejectedly flung his wilted wildflowers into the river. It seemed only fair to give it a try himself...

Winry freely admits to the memory, and still laughs sheepishly as she recalls how heartless she was at six, turning down both brothers in the space of twenty minutes.

Al trotted up eagerly, waited patiently until she looked up from playing repairman in the sandbox with their old broken toaster, and made his proposal with shy hopefulness. When she told him no, he just nodded and slumped off the way he'd come, shoulders low. She felt a twinge of regret, seeing that she'd hurt her friend, but honestly! Hadn't he ever heard of cooties?

Ed came running up the road a minute later, with neither flowers nor pretty words, but with a broad genuine grin on his face that slipped cockeyed when she repeated her refusal. Still refusing to give up, he insisted on knowing why, and she told him with some glee that she didn't like short guys. He sputtered like a teakettle and stormed off. It hurt to make Al sad, like kicking a kitten, but…there was something satisfying about teasing Ed. He turned such funny colors.

By the next day, the brothers had lived down their mutual disgrace and made up, and there were no further fights over Winry. Without knowing it, she'd probably made the wisest decision for the situation.

Ten years later, the incident is still on all three minds, whether they admit it or not. Al still treasures the memory of Ed flopping down next to him on the riverbank and slinging an arm around his shoulders in silent apology. Ed squashes the remembered embarrassment of being called childish and short, and of the rest of an afternoon spent moping and tossing rocks into the river long after Al perked up and went home.

And Winry still smiles, and still hates seeing Al hurt, and still regularly punctures Ed's ego, keeping it from outgrowing him like everything else. Very little has changed, really. Even her opinion of short men hasn't shifted much; her tastes still run to guys who are at least her height, thank you very much.

However, after ten years…Ed is still growing.


	25. Theme 25: That time

**Theme 25 – "That time"**

It was just a few inches to stretch, to reach that can on the top shelf, and Winry didn't even notice the carelessly stacked-up buckets shifting under her feet until they skidded against each other with a screech of metal and the kitchen floor came flying up to meet her in a shower of stars.

The next thing she heard was crying.

Drifting vaguely in a sea of comfortable dark, she felt light against her eyelids and blinked them open, squinting against the uncomfortable adjustment. The sound hovered at the edge of her hearing, a steady painful hitching of someone's breath, as she slowly became aware of the cool linoleum against her cheek and her arm twisted under her with a dull ache of pulled muscles. She shifted her weight and rolled onto her back, biting down on a hiss of pain as a headache flared above her eye.

The sudden sharp pain cleared her head, and she suddenly realized where she was—lying sprawled on the kitchen floor—and who was kneeling next to her—Edward—and what he was doing, which was crying his lungs out, hands pressed to his eyes, hair loose and clinging wet to his face.

"Oh, no," she whispered, and sat up, trying lamely to pat her hair back into place. "Oh, no, no no. Oh, Ed…"

The crying hiccupped and froze, and he lifted his head to look at her, and those beautiful eyes were swollen with tears, panicked with the ghost of a memory.

"Y…" he couldn't finish the word, let alone the sentence, and she scooted closer and pulled him into her arms.

"Shh," she whispered, pushing the damp hair out of his eyes and holding his face in her hands. "It's all right, it's all right, I'm fine, I'm okay…oh, Ed, I'm sorry, I slipped, I was trying to get at the canned fruit…" It sounded so stupid to her, trivial in the face of his fear.

"You wouldn't wake up," he managed, hoarsely, his fingers running down the side of her face over and over again, like he was trying to reassure himself she was still there. "I-I came in and…and you wouldn't…"

"It's okay," she repeated, gently, taking his hand and touching it to the bump swelling under her eyebrow. "See? I just hit my head. I'm going to be fine."

He let out a long, shuddering breath, and pressed his lips to the spot, once, fiercely, and then held her tight and rocked her, still whispering. "Oh, god. Oh, god…"

It was the first time in years she'd heard him come close to praying.


	26. Theme 26: A suddenly remembered instant

**Theme 26 – A suddenly remembered instant**

The first time he kissed her, it was a total surprise.

One minute she was utterly focused on the driver in her hand, trying to coax a stubborn screw out of the casing in his arm and quite oblivious to how very blue her eyes looked when she was focused on a problem, and the strand of golden hair that had escaped her ponytail to fall across her face like sunlight, and the way her patient had been gazing at her for the last few minutes.

The next minute his arm shifted under her grip, and she opened her mouth to tell him to hold still, only to find the words never made it past the warm lips suddenly pressed to hers. All that came out was a tiny, muffled yelp of surprise, which melted into a soft sigh as she slid her arms around his neck.

The driver hit the floor with a clank, and it was quiet in the workshop for a long time.


	27. Theme 27: Rejected?

**Theme 27 – Rejected?**

Another thin envelope has come in the mail, and he sits at the kitchen table and stares at it, as if he could look through the waxed lining of the envelope and see his fate printed in black and white without having to slit it open. The last one was a warning, anonymously typed, though he recognized Hawkeye's gracious efficiency in the wording.

"...and we shall do our best to assist you in maintaining your choice of lifestyle in the days to come."

A polite and obscure way to let him know that his newly rebuilt life in Risenburg was forfeit the minute Drachma decided it was time for a little payback on the demilitarized Amestrians. He has tried to imagine Mustang taking time out of his busy schedule of ladder-climbing to adjust the fate of one former underling, and they'll have to forgive him if he can't quite see it. It's not hopelessness, so much as common sense, he supposes.

The white rectangle lies on the table next to the juice pitcher, and in his mind he's already packed his old suitcase and crammed on a swaying train to who knows where. Marco's fate, to use an ancient art to kill people whose names he will never know. The dirt-poor fate of a dog, to bleed itself dry for a cold-handed master.

The debt for a silver watch never stops coming due.

Bare feet shoved into sandals as usual, she comes clattering lightly down the stairs and grabs an apple out of the basket by the stove, hopping up to perch on the counter and smile a good morning at him. He doesn't smile back, and her gaze flicks to the envelope on the table.

"Aren't you going to open it?" she asks, confused, and when his hand clenches around his fork, she frowns, hops down from the counter and grabs it, pulling the pocketknife from her pocket and slitting the flap neatly. He only makes a token attempt to snatch it back, hardly mumbles a protest for his privacy. Somehow, it's easier this way.

Her eyes skip back and forth, scanning across the page, and then she nods and folds the letter, and hands it to him...

...and grins, and the pocketknife suddenly lashes out and dips into the wires at his elbow, and _tugs_, and there's a crackling blue spark and his arm goes limp. Ed stares at her, open-mouthed with shock, as she tucks the tool back in her pocket and strolls out of the kitchen, looking smugly satisfied with herself.

It's after he fumbles the letter open one-handed that he understands.

"...declared medically unfit for duty until further notice, due to a severe automail malfunction. Shall be reconsidered for service at the recommendation of his mechanic."

The Drachman border will convulse like a plague for nearly a month before the conflict dies down; but in Risenburg, it's going to be a long, peaceful summer.


	28. Theme 28: Love triangle

**Theme 28 – Love triangle**

He wakes up sprawled across the bed as usual, shaken out of sleep by the roar of the lawnmower outside in the yard. Her hollow in the sheets next to him is empty, and he brushes sleepy fingers across the dent in her pillow and finds it long since cold. Closing his eyes with a groan, he rolls over and pulls the unused pillow over his head. The sputtering clamor outside rises and falls as it passes the window, and he struggles to fall asleep again.

It's too distracting, just lying there listening to the smug growling of the competition. This is the third time he's woken up alone in three days.

This infidelity of hers stings. For once it would be nice to awaken to her twined warm around him, the way she did when they were new at this. He would not complain about her morning breath if she stayed, he resolves, nor teasingly run a freezing metal hand down her spine. He would be careful not to kick off the covers, if she was there to keep warm instead of downstairs by five in the morning, running loving fingers over some captivating new invention.

Occasionally he's been tempted to curl an arm around her waist and pull her back to bed, when he's roused out of sleep by her covert attempts to slip away in the wee hours of the morning. He hasn't dared yet. He can survive her affairs, but not the rejection of being physically squirmed away from. Besides, she's probably already got a wrench in her hand. She keeps it on her bedside table, next to her picture of him.

Scowling, he reaches for his own small indiscretion, tucked half under the bed on the floor. His old alchemy books are a long-familiar mistress, but it just isn't the same. There is more blue fire in her eyes than a thousand arrays could produce…

Laughing at his own drowsily bitter train of thought, he tosses the book back to the floor and goes downstairs to take a crack at making breakfast. It really is ridiculous, to be jealous of her career and lifelong obsession. Whatever she does with her mornings, her nights still belong to him. He pauses in the kitchen window to wave out at her, kerchief pulled tight around her sweaty brow as she pushes the lawnmower down another strip of dewy grass.

She doesn't notice, and he sighs and turns back to the stove.

He has begun to understand, a little, how she felt in the old days when he went constantly gallivanting off to consort with the twin femme fatales of military and science. Heartless boy that he was, never sparing a thought for her feelings as he curled up cozily with tomes of alchemy right in front of her, ignoring her attempts to converse. He feels a twinge of remorse, now that he knows the other side of it. These love triangles are vicious things.


	29. Theme 29: The other side

**Theme 29 – The other side**

Why is it that every time Ed visits Rush Valley, he ends up stripped to his underthings in the middle of the street? He's always appreciated that his automail is something special. Winry certainly tells him that enough. But the minute anyone here notices it…

Well, the rushing stampede that results certainly explains the valley's name.

Edward is thoroughly sick of strangers running their sweaty fingers over every inch of his gleaming prosthetics, oohing and aahing like gawkers at a circus. But there's such of a crush of bodies around them that he can barely move to escape.

Winry is nearby, ringed with a throng of admiring fellow mechanics all trying to outdo each other with clever observations. Ed grimly imagines that next they'll start comparing wrench sizes. He would be out of here in two seconds if it weren't for that gratified flush on her face.

Someone jostles him from behind, and Ed lets out an _oof!,_ falling against a young mechanic in bib overalls and not much else. She coos at him and runs a finger down the knotted scars on his chest, and he flinches back, shocked. Someone's hand pushes against his bare back; bodies press close all around him.

A burly man is nodding sagely over the sleek design of his forearm grill. "…and the best part is the way these grooves allow heat to escape more easily without compromising the strength or waterproofing of the casing," his admirer booms, leaving fingerprints on the metal as he examines it. Ed tries to pull away, but someone has his wrist held tight, and he suddenly realizes that he's really trapped.

Intense claustrophobia wells up in him like vomit, and he squeezes his eyes shut, forcing back memories of a million clinging little hands running over him, chattering, tugging at his skin…

"All right, move along!" comes the sudden shout. "Show's over!"

The crowd grumbles and doesn't budge.

"I said _**leave him alone!"**_ Winry bellows, and they scatter immediately. He glimpses her brandishing a wrench like an avenging valkyrie, and then his knees give out and he stumbles a step forward, trembling.

And she's there, carefully helping him over to a nearby bench, her eyes spilling apologies for this bitter curdling of what she had always considered a harmless joke at his expense.

"I didn't realize how bad it had gotten," she says, gently helping him on with his shirt. "I'm so sorry, Ed. I won't let them do this anymore, I promise. Those _stupid idiots!"_ and the last part is spat like a curse as she wraps his jacket around his shoulders, fiercely protective and furious.

The best part, he decides then, is not the design of the grill. It's the other side of it, where her name and mechanic's insignia are chiseled. She's left her mark on him, and she will always be there to chase off his demons. If he has to be marked with anyone's name, he can't think of anyone better.


	30. Theme 30: The horizon

**Theme 30 – The horizon**

His eyes are as golden as the sun, and hers are as blue as the sky.

It suits them both.

They live so vividly, bright color and emotion spilling out of them with every breath, and when they first meet after a separation they often clash fiercely, spraying a rainbow of furious reds and yellows until their brilliance settles down. But once this touchy alchemy is taken care of, he coasts in the comfort of her domain, at peace with her. He belongs with her, and she with him. Without him she has no light, and without her he would have no place to call his own. And each time he leaves her to travel the valley of the night, she knows he will return.

This, then, is the measure of their affection; how he comes into view like the sunrise and lights up the blue of her eyes, and how her world slips into dusk again when he vanishes once more behind the horizon.


	31. Theme 31: To be hurt, to heal

**Theme 31 – To be hurt, to heal**

and sometimes he sits up straight in the middle of the night gasping open-mouthed and trembling, with the covers clenched in his fists and wide eyes unseeing, blinded by bloody memories

and sometimes tears run silently down his sleeping cheeks and he speaks,  
short clear words that mean nothing to her, usually, though once he cried 'mother' and she wept with him till morning

and sometimes she swears she can hear some broken part of him rattling around in his chest as she pillows her head there,  
like a piece knocked free and lost somewhere inside him (she wishes she could open him up and take it out, clean it and bolt it snugly back in place with a new coat of paint for his poor chipped heart while she was at it)

and sometimes he wakes up screaming, struggling away from her arms as she tries to hold him close when all he can see is a door slowly opening with all the universe behind it, waiting to fall on him like the tide

and once he struck out at her before he was awake, screamed 'give him back' and slammed the back of his hand across her nose (it bruised later,  
and he couldn't look at her, and the shame in his eyes at hurting her was like a tiny vicious flame burning inside)

and he is so broken, oh god, how did she let him get so broken?

but no, that's an Ed thing to say. One of them has to know how to decline the irrational blame.

and she sands down the broken edges on which he cuts himself even now,  
slowly, with quiet words and stern patience and kisses and time, and the warm steady rise and fall of her breath as she lies next to him, tangled in sheets he's kicked off and sweated through in his labyrinth of a thousand nightmares.  
someday she'll lead him out of this hall of sick reflections inside his head. she'll trace a map along the lines of his face with her fingertips and break every damn mirror in there with a kiss truly meant, and then perhaps they'll both be free.

she's always had a knack for fixing things, and how many thousand times harder can this be?


	32. Theme 32: Precious things, treasure

**Theme 32 – Precious things/treasure**

Edward hadn't paid any real attention to the old oak tree in years, always more interested in the burnt-out space where their house had been. Its blackened branches arched overhead, ignored as he went through the old ritual of pacing the lines where walls had stood, kitchen and stairs and their mother's bedroom and the book-lined study that had birthed a tangled abomination.

It was when he turned to go that the sparkle of light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned, puzzled. A tiny flash of light beckoned again from the old hole in the trunk, and he walked curiously back to the dead oak.

The hollow had once been almost too high to reach, but now he had to kneel to look into it. They'd stopped hiding treasures there at about the time that their mother died. A lot of their childish habits had died with her. Years later, he felt strangely shy at disturbing this old cache of memories. Pulling off his glove in an odd gesture of respect, his hand hovered at the hole for a moment before slipping inside.

Reverently, he ran his fingers over the shifting smooth hulls of acorns, felt the crystalline surface of a rock and curled his fingers around it, lifting it out along with a handful of other treasures. Opening his hand, he examined the collection in his palm. A large, jagged piece of river quartz was what he'd felt; it was laden with glittering mica, but it wasn't enough to have thrown off the light he'd seen. He poked through the other things. Faded bits of colored string, dried nuts nibbled by insects, various small lopsided toys that were the early products of their alchemy, a rusted-shut pocketknife…

And then he realized what was bothering him. Among all of these were new treasures, things that he didn't remember putting in. The porcelain hand of a doll. A bright blue feather, only a little faded. A toy screwdriver. A silk flower, which he'd seen before; tucked into the ribbon circling Winry's old straw hat, the one she always wore traveling before it blew away at the station one day and someone stepped through the crown.

She'd been there, still adding to their history even after they'd given up on the past. Unlike them, she hadn't consigned that life to a closed box. She was still carrying on the old traditions.

At the bottom of the handful, he found the source of the reflected spark of sunlight; a single screw, brightly polished and familiar. Yanking off his other glove, he matched it to the ones riveting the back of his metal hand. It was strangely charming to know that she'd kept a part of him there. He tucked the handful of knickknacks away again, reverently, and walked off down the road with his hands tucked in his pockets and a grin bright on his face.

He couldn't ask for a better compliment than to be numbered among her treasures.


	33. Theme 33: Magic

**Theme 33 – Magic**

Edward never really believed in magic. Granted, as a very little kid, maybe he swallowed a few of the stories his mother used to read to them. And yes, he went through his allotted stage of searching for gnomes in the garden under the cabbages, and pointed eagerly at passing dragonflies, clamoring for his mother's confirmation that, yes, that was a fairy. But from the moment he picked up a leather-bound book and found in its pages the chemical makeup of soil and plants, and the fine meshing lines of a diagram of a dragonfly's anatomy, his view of life slipped permanently into a scientific track. Besides, unlike most children, he found the explanations of natural phenomena much more fascinating than any fanciful ideas about tiny people and colored light. You could comprehend nature. You could do things with it. It was real.

This sensible view of life frustrated Winry to no end. She wasn't the world's most whimsical child, of course; even as a little girl, she preferred fixing the washing machine over tea parties in the garden with Nelly. But she had a definite sense of the romantic, and that included the possibility of things unexplained by Ed's neatly-defined rules of science and logic and alchemy.

So while Ed buried his nose in book after book, it was Winry who thrust handfuls of flowers into his face and tried to make him see that, yes, Ed, they're slightly wilted and the pistils have darkened which means they're probably about to go to seed early this season after all this dry weather, but they're also _pretty,_ darn it. When the Northern Lights twinkled faintly over the mountains, she stomped her foot and told him that she didn't care if they were really aurora boreawhatsit and caused by something in the atmosphere. She finally gave up on him when he informed her that evolution as he'd studied it could never have created something like a tiny person with butterfly wings. They were nine years old at the time.

The subject didn't come up again until more than ten years later, on a cool summer evening. They were sprawled in the waving tall grass of a field in Risenburg, lazily trailing their fingers through each others' hair and looking up at the star-studded sky. He rolled over to kiss her softly, the warm weight of him over her like sky over earth, and when he drew back slightly and she opened her eyes, there was a shower of stars falling through the night above them.

Winry gasped faintly, her eyes going wide with delight, and raised her arm to point. "Look," she breathed.

Ed didn't need to turn and look. He could see every shooting star reflected in the depths of her eyes. It caught his breath in his throat, but he managed to nod, gazing down at her in wonder.

Perhaps there were some things that science couldn't quite explain.


	34. Theme 34: It's not anxiety

**Theme 34 – "It's not anxiety."**

He wasn't surprised when he woke to find her pillow cold. Winry tended toward midnight inventing sessions. But when he couldn't get back to sleep and hauled himself out of bed to make some tea, there were retching noises coming from the bathroom as he passed it.

He was inside in a flash, gathering back her hair and holding it for her as she heaved. When her stomach was empty, she sat back on the floor and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, looking pale and sheepish.

"Sorry about that," she muttered. "Something I ate didn't agree with me."

Ed was at the sink, running her a glass of water. She took it, swished and spat into the toilet gratefully as he sat down next to her with an uneasy look on his face.

"Winry," he said, worriedly, "I believed that the first time. This is, what? The third time this week? My cooking isn't that bad."

She laughed at that, but shook her head. "I'm fine, Ed. Believe me."

"I'm trying to," he said, cradling her cheek with his human hand. "But…Winry, the only reason I've been cooking so much is because the smell of food is making you sick. You're getting headaches constantly—don't give me that look, I've seen you rubbing your temples when you think I'm not looking."

"Really, it's nothing," Winry insisted, starting to stand. "I'm fine, I just—" Her face went pale, and she sat down again with a dazed thump.

Ed was too worried to bother with I-told-you-sos. "What's wrong?" he asked, a trace of desperation creeping into his voice. "Granny Pinako told me you've been going into town to see the doctor. Why didn't you tell me you were sick?"

"I'm not sick, Ed!" Winry said, thwapping him on the shoulder. He caught her hand.

"Well, what is it, then?" he demanded. "Is it stress? I know you've been getting loads of commissions lately, maybe you're having anxiety attacks from too much work, or—"

Winry burst out laughing.

"Ed," she said, lacing her fingers gently through his. "Stop worrying. It's not anxiety. I'm just having a baby."

Ed blinked. "Oh, is that a—_what?!"_ He stared at her, flabbergasted. "You're…I mean, we're…having a… Why didn't you just_ tell_ me?"

"I wanted to surprise you when I knew for sure," Winry said softly. He had lost too much already. "I didn't want it to be a false alarm."

Ed nodded, slowly. "So…do you know for sure now?"

"Yeah, I think so," Winry said. "It'll be in about seven months."

"A baby," he whispered, wide-eyed…and suddenly his face lit up like an alchemical array in full glow, and he let out a whoop and caught her in an ecstatic kiss.

"Happy?" she asked, grinning, when he drew back.

"Are you kidding?" he hooted. "A baby! We've gotta call Al!" He helped her to her feet, and they hurried downstairs, leaving bathroom and anxiety behind.


	35. Theme 35: Ordinary

**Theme 35 - Ordinary**

It had been a long time since Nelly from down the valley had visited, and when she came trotting up the road with a basketful of fresh eggs and the news from the local farms, Winry invited her eagerly in for a glass of iced tea and gossip. The usual cheerful teasing and greetings commenced quickly as they sat down in the kitchen.

"You look great, Winnie," Nelly bubbled, leaning her elbows on the table. "All that working over hot engines must be great for the complexion, huh? Your skin's like Xingese porcelain, I'm dead with jealousy."

"Come on, it's not that great," Winry laughed, flicking a strand of blond hair out of her eyes. "Besides, Granny makes me wash with lye soap. That's enough to kill off any skin problem."

"I think it would kill off most of my skin," Nelly laughed. "Honestly, mine's paper-thin, it would dry up like—oh, my god, who is_ that?"_

Puzzled, Winry followed her wide-eyed gaze into the living room. It took her a minute to realize that her friend was staring at Edward, who had wandered in to fetch a book, shirtless as usual.

"Oh, that's just Ed," she laughed. "He's here for automail repairs."

Nelly goggled. "Ed? You mean, Edward _Elric?_ That skinny kid who used to live next door to you? That's _him?!"_

Winry shrugged, still puzzled. "Yeah…why?"

"Why?" Nelly echoed, looking at her in disbelief. "Winnie, _look_ at him!"

Winry looked. She saw Ed, glaring up at the book he wanted, which had inconveniently located itself on the top shelf.

"He's…Ed," she said. "So? He's nothing special."

"Nothing special?" Nelly cried in a shrill whisper. "You're telling me you've got a gorgeous blonde in leather pants wandering around your house and you think it's nothing special? If that's normal here, I'm visiting you more often!"

Winry blinked. A gorgeous what? Twisting around in her chair for a better angle, she squinted at Ed as he stretched for the book. What was so special about—

It hit her suddenly. For just a split second, something detached in her vision, and she saw—not grumpy careless Ed, but an extremely good-looking fourteen-year-old, with striking golden eyes and tousled blond hair, tanned and well-muscled and practically sewn into a pair of mouthwatering black leather pants—

And then she blinked, and he was Ed again, cursing as the heavy book nearly fell on his head. But…somehow, now, a hint of the boy Nelly saw in him lingered. Winry frowned, and poured another glass of iced tea.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she grumbled. "He's just Ed."

And if she said it firmly enough, she could almost believe it again.


	36. Theme 36: Until we meet again

**Theme 36 – Until we meet again**

His jacket smells like her.

Ed is sitting half-sprawled in his train seat with his booted feet propped on his suitcase, working his way through a stick of dumplings with syrup. The scent niggles at his senses, first there and then not, and he keeps turning his head to see if he can catch where it's coming from, like someone trying to get a good look at a bug buzzing at the edge of their vision. It takes him a while to realize that it's his red overcoat that's giving off her scent, and he glances down at it with a look of vaguely confused betrayal.

It makes sense, now that he thinks about it. He gave it to Granny to wash, after their latest adventures covered it in sticky who-knows-what from some nutball alchemist's laboratory beakers. He did his best with alchemy, but it still stank something awful, and Pinako said she knew a few tricks for getting out smells. Well, they certainly worked, because now the musty chemical smell has been traded for the smell of girl. She must have thrown it in with Winry's laundry, and Ed is not amused. His clothes have no business smelling like girls. Especially this girl.

Munching his last bite of dumpling, Ed shoots his brother a sidelong look. Al is fully engrossed in a scientific digest they picked up at the station newsstand, which he swiped while Ed was busy buying food from a peddler kid out the window. Ed watches his little brother read for a while, then glances back at his jacket. Now that he's conscious of the scent of her, he can't quite get his mind off of it. It's not a bad smell, kind of sweet but not sugary or fake like most girls. Winry doesn't use perfume. She smells like machine oil and copper wiring and soap, and a little bit like apple blossom shampoo. It will be faded by tomorrow, he supposes. It's probably the last time he'll smell it until they meet again.

Ed gives his brother a last wary look, to make sure he's not paying attention. Then he gives in to the urge, presses his face into the folds of soft red cloth at the bend of his elbow and breathes her in. If he closes his eyes, it's almost like she's there.

"Brother, are you all right?"

Al is giving him an odd look over the digest. Ed drops his arm hurriedly, a slight blush rising in his cheeks. "Uh, yeah, I'm fine!" he exclaims, standing up. "I'm going to go throw this away now. Gimme my digest back," he blusters, snatching the magazine as he edges past Al to carry the empty dumpling stick off to the trash.

A noise of protest escapes Al as the magazine is whipped out of his hands. Then he notices his brother's blushing face, and his eyes brighten slightly in that particular way that means he's smiling knowingly. But he says nothing.


	37. Theme 37: Silver watch

**Theme 37 – Silver watch**

When she answered the door, there was a man in the familiar double-breasted blue uniform standing outside.

"Is this the Rockbell residence?" he asked, shooting an apprehensive look at the power drill in her hand. She'd come running from her workbench and forgotten to put it down. Noticing his gaze, she colored slightly and held it behind her back, realized that looked stupid, and stooped to set it down on the floor instead.

"Ah, yes," she stammered, when that had been taken care of. "As a matter of fact, I'm Miss Winry Rockbell."

"Excellent, just who I needed," the young soldier said, and fished a small manila envelope out of his pocket, emptying the contents into one broad palm. They gleamed dully as he held them out. "Could you please tell me if this watch is familiar?"

Winry felt her stomach plummet into her boots. Numbly, she reached out and took the…well, 'watch' was probably an overstatement. The lid of this sad remnant was bent and rusted open, the glass cracked, the white clock face discolored with time. The once-shining surface was pocked and scoured, and the minute hand was missing completely.

But there were the words, carved carefully into the inside.

_Don't forget. 3.OCT.10_

"It belongs to my fr—uh, client," she managed. "Edward Elric. He's been missing for a few months, but-"

"Thanks, that'll do," the man said, holding out a hand for the watch. "You're sure the watch is his?"

"Positive," she said. "I saw the carving inside it once. It has…special meaning for him."

"That will be very helpful," the soldier assured her, sliding the battered watch back into the envelope. Winry's stomach churned nervously.

"Has he been found?" she couldn't help asking. The soldier shook his head.

"No, ma'am. I'm with the Reole investigation. More than one State Alchemist was lost in the conflict there last year, and we wanted to confirm ownership of this watch as part of the investigation. It was found in the desert last week by a forensic team."

For a moment, Winry wasn't sure whether to relax or cry. If he'd been found with the watch in that kind of condition…well, she would probably have just confirmed his identity in death. But, all this not-knowing…

"Could I keep it?"

The soldier blinked at her. "I beg your pardon?"

"Well," she went on, somewhat surprised at herself, "I'm sort of his next of kin, besides his brother. The watch was his, so…"

"I'm afraid this watch is important evidence, Miss," the soldier told her, rather regretfully. "But," he added, "I could always see about sending it back to you after the investigation…"

"That would be wonderful," Winry told him, favoring him with a bright smile. He smiled back, shook her hand and said his goodbyes.

She closed the door, already dreaming up ways of restoring it. It would fit nicely in her coverall pocket, she decided. It would be good to have something important of his close to her heart.

* * *

_A note to readers - The most recent chapter of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga showed a map of Amestris with most of the major cities' names spelled out in Roman letters for the first time ever, clearing up a lot of the spelling issues. I've decided to respect the author's wishes, and therefore it's the newly-official "Reole" and "Resembool" for me, even if I do kind of prefer Risenburg._


	38. Theme 38: Nowhere but here

**Theme 38 – Nowhere but here**

Resembool is home.

It's undeniable fact, as surely as two hydrogen molecules and one of oxygen make the backbone of life. But that doesn't mean Ed is always eager to return.

Resembool is blue skies and golden wheat, but it's also the silhouette of a burning house and the last gasp of a dying mother. It's the back of his father's head, golden hair tied back to spill over the collar of his jacket as he walks out the door. It's the screaming insanity of the Gate, and the warm slickness of blood on an ice-cold floor as he drags himself across it one-armed toward a dim corner where a suit of armor waits. It's funerals and loss and injury and pain.

There are days when he wishes he could burn it all.

But Resembool is also blue eyes and golden hair, and Winry's strong hands and bright smile. It's Granny Pinako looking knowingly over her newspaper as he bickers with her granddaughter over who will get the last blueberry muffin at breakfast, while Al giggles and tries not to get between them. It's her fingers braiding his hair, adjusting his arm, lacing through his own fingers in rare now-and-then moments of understanding.

Ed will never really escape his hometown. It's part of him, swimming in his blood and written in the marrow of his bones, and so is the girl who waits for him there.

Winry is Resembool.

And Resembool is home.


	39. Theme 39: Please, request

**Theme 39 – Please/request**

It was one thing to have an irresponsible brother, Al ruminated as he trudged up the road to the Jensen's windmill. It was another thing to have to go fetch him for dinner when he wandered off to annoy Winry at one of her repair jobs and neither of them came back for three hours. Granny Pinako was not pleased with her grandkids, and Al got to be the messenger.

Shaking his head, Al reached for the handle to the mill door.

"Nmgh…little…to the left…"

Al froze. That was Winry's voice inside the mill, breathless and gasping.

"H-here…?"

And that was Ed, just as out of breath. What on earth…?

"…mm, yeah," Winry sighed. "That's perfect…just…hold it for a…second…"

"Dunno if I…can…"

"Well, you're…just gonna…have to," Winry snapped. "I have to…oh, shit."

"What?"

"I can't…oh, shit. Hang on….just a sec."

For a minute, the only sound was their heavy breathing. Al found himself wide-eyed with embarrassment. If he tiptoed away quietly, maybe—

"Aah!" Winry yelped, and Al froze again, feeling as guilty as a gawker at a train wreck. "Ed--!"

"I can't…ngh," Ed gasped. "Hurry _up!"_

"I'm trying," Winry insisted. "I can't…stretch f-far enough!"

Ed let out a frustrated groan. "Well, you should have…ahh…thought of that before we started…"

"Well, if I'd realized it was so damn _big_, I wouldn't…_have _this problem…!"

"Winry…" Ed complained. "I can't…hold on much longer!"

"Try…shifting a little…this way," Winry gasped. Suddenly, she cried out. "Aah! Ed, _hold it!"_

"I..._said_ I…_can't!"_ Ed groaned. "Dammit, Winry, just let me-"

There was a female shriek, bordering on panic. "Ed, no, you promised--! Ed, _please!"_

The door flew open with a crash, and Al stormed into the room, no longer caring what he saw. "Brother!" he shouted, outraged. "What are you doing to Win…ry…?"

Al's voice trailed off as he looked around. His brother and friend were braced—fully clothed—underneath the heavy iron housing for the mill engine, red-faced and shaking with the effort of trying to lever it back into place. Seeing him, Winry blew a strand of sweaty hair out of her eyes and sighed with relief.

"Al, thank god. Hand me that…ugh…can of bolts, would you? I have to get this…stupid thing bolted back in place before…your useless brother drops it…"

Ed's face turned a shade darker red. "I am_ not_ useless! This…thing is…goddamn heavy!" he yelled.

As they started to bicker again, Al looked from them, to the coffee can of bolts sitting just out of Winry's reach on the floor. Meekly, he picked up the can and handed it to Winry.

"Um…here," he said, his voice an embarrassed squeak. Then he turned and fled. The door clattered shut behind him.

Ed and Winry exchanged glances. "What's his problem?" Winry wondered aloud.

"No idea…" Ed muttered. "Just get this thing…bolted down before my…shoulder cracks."

"Hey, I…built your arm…better than that," Winry growled back, and began swiftly bolting down the edges of the casing, as Al's clanking footsteps faded into the distance.


	40. Theme 40: Egoism, selfishness

**Theme 40 – Egoism/selfishness**

When did it become selfishness to want someone else to be safe?

Winry can't help wondering, especially these days when practically every visit they get from Ed and Al starts with extensive repairs and ends with the boys giving her and Granny looks that just scream 'fixing all this in my memory in case I never see it again' and heading out the door with their shoulders squared like soldiers to the wars. She twists her kerchief in her hands until it's too sweaty to bother tying back on her head, and watches them from the balcony until they've vanished over the horizon. She scolds herself for wanting them to stay there forever, where no one will shoot at them or blow them to shreds or alchemize them into a fine web of bloody flesh and shattered metal or—ugh. That train of thought stops there, before she ends up running after them and hauling them back by the scruffs of their necks.

And then she wonders, why is she scolding herself to begin with? Doesn't she have their best interests in mind? Doesn't she just want them to be happy, to stop throwing themselves recklessly into danger? How is it selfish to wish for life and joy for another? Just because she would rather have them share that life and joy with her, is it really selfish to long for it?

Maybe that's where the problem is, she decides, after an hour of mulling it over one afternoon as she works out her confusion on a complicated rewiring job. On some level, she has been assuming that they would be happier here with her than out there dodging bullets and questing for renewal. Maybe it's not so much selfishness, and more like egoism. It's distressing, to think that she might be less worth their time than a world full of killers and fools, but there it is.

She solders a plate into place and rests her cheek on her sooty hand, and closes her eyes, trying to imagine that she would rather be the best automail mechanic in the world than have them here next to her, whole and safe. Al chatting happily with Granny. Ed cheerfully outlining their latest harmless research to her, as she does simple maintenance on his arm instead of piecing its blasted remains back together.

That image is brighter and stronger than her dreams of glory. And her dreams of glory are pretty damn bright. Selfish or egotistical or just plain stupid, she can't escape her longings. She sighs and goes back to her work, feeling like a fool.

It would have helped, if she'd known that that same bright image floats through Ed's happier dreams, a refuge from the long hard days of fighting until his limbs ache and studying until his head is splitting. Winry's not the only one who can't escape her desperate struggle to believe in happily-ever-after. This quest that she can't help hating is, after all, just a means to an end.


	41. Theme 41: Irrational

**Theme 41 – Irrational**

The train lets out a howling whistle, belching smoke and steam into the clear blue sky, and Scieszka wails helplessly into Winry's shoulder as the great wheels begin to move. A few years ago, Winry might have shed some tears of her own. She would have longed miserably for the train to stop, for the brothers to step off and back into her arms. At the moment, she mostly wishes Scieszka would stop crying.

After all, by now she's lost count of the times she's stood here to see them off, with the platform shaking under her feet as the smoky behemoth slowly heaves itself into motion, inching down the track with a screech of underbelly mechanics and the steady chuffing of the smokestack high above. And no matter how battered they are when they return, they always return in the end. Winry grips that fact as firmly as she can, like a hammer to bash her doubts into splinters. It doesn't matter that this time they're on the run from the world. It doesn't matter that the hair she braided this morning is dyed black as charcoal to keep from being recognized, or that the snapping golden eyes that met hers with unusual shyness last night are hidden behind dark glasses. It doesn't matter that he's sealed his brother in a shell of copper to hide him from prying eyes. It certainly doesn't matter that he insisted on tottering down the road in ridiculous high stilts, so that Scieszka bit back laughter through her tears until he got the hang of walking.

Ed is just being careful, she reminds herself, gazing up at him as he hangs out the window with his dark braid flapping under the brim of his hat, waving goodbye with wide sweeps of his arm. That old hell-raiser grin is shining bright on his face, so familiar that she wonders briefly how anyone who knew him could be fooled by his stupid disguise. The train picks up speed, pulling out of the station, and Scieszka's sobs grow louder as she buries her face in Winry's shirt. Winry wraps an arm around her friend's heaving shoulders, but doesn't look away from Ed as he vanishes rapidly into the distance. Her eyes feel riveted to his smiling face. She squeezes Scieszka in a gentle hug, swallowing the cry of dread that's bubbling in her throat.

_Come back,_ she thinks, forlornly, in spite of herself, in spite of the logic that tells her this time is no different from all the others. It's not as though this is the end. It's not as if this is the last time she'll ever see him smile.

The train snakes off over the horizon, and Winry gazes after it with a strange sense of unreality, as Scieszka's tears soak her shirt. All her best rationale can't shake the feeling that grim winter has just descended in the middle of her summer world.


	42. Theme 42: We are equals on this ground

**Theme 42 – We are equals on this ground**

They're both idiots, really.

I've called Brother a dummy to his face and he doesn't really seem to mind, but I think part of that is that we're brothers and he knows I love him anyway. I wouldn't dare tell Winry that to her face. Armor is pretty convenient sometimes, but still, I don't want to experiment with what a wrench could do to it.

It's true, though. Look at some of the scrapes Winry has gotten into. Look at any of the scrapes Brother has gotten into. Neither of them thinks first, you know? They just go for it, which is what makes them special, I suppose. Except it's also what makes them hard to live with sometimes. And hard not to laugh at, other times.

And look at the way they bicker. Every time we visit for maintenance, it's the same old thing. Granny and I have thought about writing it down on cue cards to flash at them sometime when they start fighting, just to tease.

He broke her spectacular new automail, which she just installed last month.

She's too attached to the automail anyway.

He's the one literally attached to it, so he should take better care of it.

She's the mechanic, not him.

He should pay better attention to her warnings, then.

She's going to be up a financial creek someday when he gets his body back and doesn't need automail anymore.

He's going to take a lot longer to find a way if he keeps transmuting his automail all out of shape.

It's called a field repair.

It's called warping her precious babies into scrap metal.

Automail geek.

Alchemy geek.

And that's the point where the argument always stops, when they look at each other and realize that it's a case of pot calling the kettle black. They're both geeks. Completely obsessive over the things they love, whatever those things might be. Equals on this ground.

Usually they make disgruntled noises then, and look pointedly away from each other, and she goes back to fixing his arm, and they're kind of civil for a while. It's a nice break from the usual squabbling. I can get some peace and quiet, maybe go outside to play with Den, without worrying about keeping Brother's skull in one piece.

They really are hopeless, but you can't help loving them in spite of it.

Or even for it. You know?


	43. Theme 43: Proof of a theory

**Theme 43 – Proof of a theory**

If she hasn't said a word in the long hours they've been quietly reading together, here on the living room floor, for once undisturbed by family or fighting, then who is he to break that balance?

If she's pretending too hard to be absorbed in her book, glancing up surreptitiously as she turns the pages, he can certainly do the same with his.

If she sighs sleepily and leans her shoulders against his, it makes perfect equilibrium between them if he leans back as well.

If her hand brushes his as she reaches for her mug of tea, it's only fair to brush lightly back, a slight slide of his warm knuckles across hers.

If she feels it, sits up and smiles at him, sidelong and teasing, it's natural to return the favor with a smile of his own, bright behind loose golden hair.

If she reaches out to brush the hair out of his face, no one could blame him for touching her cheek in return, tracing his fingertips along her warm skin.

If her breath catches in her throat, it's no worse than his own dizziness.

If she leans in an inch, he'd be a hypocrite not to lean in too.

And when they melt into each other in the oldest of transmutations, he can't help agreeing with his old master's words.

Equivalent trade in action can be, at times, a beautiful thing.


	44. Theme 44: Stronger, stronger

**Theme 44 - Stronger, stronger**

Steel for the base, because steel is the strongest of all. Forged and molded until it shines blue like a sword from Xing. His namesake, bolted to his bones to protect him.

_(She's huddled over the table in the little pool of light from the lamp, rumpled and sleepy in her pajamas. One hand cradles her cheek, elbow propped on the tabletop. The other hand is cramped around a pen, scribbling feverishly. Tick≈tick≈tick goes the clock on the wall.)_

Aluminum to lift the weight from his shoulders, ounce for ounce. Extra speed to carry him out of the path of danger. A little less to drag him down as his body struggles to grow.

_(Tick≈tick≈tick goes the clock on the wall, and her sleepy head droops ever closer to the table. Her hair is burnished in the dim light, hanging loose. If Pinako was still awake, she would scold her for ruining her eyesight, but she doesn't want him to know she was up this late, so the lamp stays low. She smothers a yawn, and keeps theorizing.)_

Iron crossed off the list, despite its brute strength, because the last thing that irresponsible fool needs is an arm that rusts easily.

_(She smothers a yawn, and keeps theorizing. Crumpled papers litter the floor, tattooed thickly with diagrams and alloy formulas. Her eyes are starting to burn when she blinks. Her thoughts scatter sleepily as she tries to sift through them for new ideas. Rebuild it faster. Better. Stronger, stronger. A fascinating experiment)_

Varieties of copper wiring, each with their own merits and drawbacks. Weigh the choices carefully. Maybe some of that new fiberoptic stuff they pioneered in East City last year?

_(A fascinating experiment. He should never have had it installed, not at that young age. If automail was a more ethically regulated field, like formal medicine, they could have gotten in trouble for it. But he insisted, and now she's losing sleep while he snores softly upstairs, sprawled like a starfish with missing limbs waiting to be replaced. She'll be ready by morning.)_

Zinc...oh, damn. What is zinc used for? Can't remember, and that's pretty pathetic. Just finish filling out the order form for the new shoulder ball joint from the Valley...

_(She'll be ready by morning. They can mail the special orders first thing, and it'll be another extra day or two, but he can wait. If he raises a fuss, she can tell him honestly that he might end up a little taller with this new alloy and design. A little faster. A little harder to kill.)_

The last equation, double-checked on Granny's old abacus. Everything adds up just so. Armor the knight before he rides off into battle. If this is all that's possible, gotta do it right.

_(A little stronger. So he can come back safe, the next time, and the next.)_

Mark the pages. Close the journal.

_(Stronger, stronger.)_

Time for bed, at last.


	45. Theme 45: Vexing

**Theme 45 - Vexing**

There was something frighteningly powerful, Ed had to admit, about the way babies turned normally sensible people into wibbling piles of mush.

True, some people were more susceptible than others (Alphonse, for instance, who reacted to anything little and cute with an embarrassing amount of baby-talk and petting). And this baby was, after all, the offspring of Hawkeye herself, giving it a natural advantage against the iron defenses of its mother (whom Edward strongly suspected ate bullets for breakfast).

Still, Edward would never have expected a couple of tough women like Winry and Hawkeye to be reduced to fawning over a drooling newborn.

Not that Ed had anything against kids; generally, he liked them, even if they did tend to use him as a jungle gym. But this was Mustang-spawn! It was a matter of principle!

Besides, if the dark hair and natural poise were any clue, this one was a chip off the old block. He was already charming everyone at the christening party with his oh-so-adorable burbling and cooing. _Give him ten years_, Ed grimly predicted, _and he'll be chatting up his fellow primary-schoolers and schmoozing for points with the headmaster._

"Ian David Mustang...how'd you come up with that?" Winry was asking.

Riza made a face. "Well, to be honest, they're just old family names. It was going to be David Ian, but then Edward very helpfully pointed out to Roy that his initials would be D.I.M..."

Winry snorted. "And that was the end of that?"

"Quite."

Ian squealed, as if to remind them that the important issue at hand was dancing attention on _him_. An indulgent murmur rose from the assembled women.

Ed grimaced, almost wishing he'd gone off with the older men to get sloshing drunk and smoke blue cigars. Whose idea had it been to stay with the girls? Al's? He was going to punch his head, he decided, just as soon as Al was finished waiting for his fifth turn to hold the stupid baby.

Something nudged his side, and Ed looked up. It was Winry, beaming and holding out the cooing bundle as if she expected him to take it.

"Wha--" he snapped. Winry pressed a finger to his lips, effectively shutting him up.

"Shh," she whispered. "He's exhausted, don't wake him."

Ed looked down in bemusement at the dozing child, all little soft limbs and drowsy fluttering eyelashes. In that puzzled moment, Winry gently transferred Ian into his arms. He took him automatically, startled by the warm weight of him. He'd somehow expected him to be less...consequential.

"Isn't he beautiful?" Winry whispered, and in his wonder at hearing Winry wax eloquent about something that didn't come with assembly required, Edward found himself nodding.

Maybe it was the way her blue eyes lit up as she smiled at the sleeping infant. Whatever it was, for one brief moment, babies didn't seem quite so vexing, after all.


	46. Theme 46: Follow & Followed

**Theme 46 - Follow & Followed**

He might never have paused if not for his damn leg.

The Rush Valley heat beating down on him had plastered his hair with sweat. Al had already scampered off to check out the marketplace. Ed certainly didn't begrudge Al the chance to be a normal, carefree fifteen-year-old, but he missed his support--literally. By the time he reached Dominic's shop, dragging the dead weight of his leg, it was all he could do to lean in the doorway and gasp. And when no welcoming shouts or flying wrenches issued from the door, he peered inside.

He saw absolute chaos.

The shop was just like he remembered, wooden benches shoved against the walls, automail limbs hung on the walls like prize fish. But the entire workshop buzzed with energy. Waiting patrons filled the benches, shouting and joking. Dominic himself leaned on the counter, surveying the room. As Ed watched, Paninya burst in, balancing a tray of teacups as she waded through the bustle.

But where--

"He-ey, would one of you hooligans hand me a needle-nose?"

He recognized the tone of voice from previous trips to the Valley--Winry, in the brassy mode she relaxed into around fellow mechanics.

"Right here, Miz Winry!" came a chorus of voices, a dozen skinny pliers held out in offering. He finally spotted her then, kneeling next to an elderly patient. Laughing, she shifted up to one knee and stretched, reknotting her red kerchief; then pretended to consider gravely before snatching one of the tools.

"Thanks, everybody!" she winked. "Dunno what I'd do without you guys!"

"D'you need anything else, Winry?"

"You can use my tools anytime!"

"I could fetch some lemonade!"

"Gawd, Win, they're gonna drown you in help!" Paninya snorted, holding out a cup of iced-tea. Winry snatched it without looking and gulped half of it, already working again.

"Good, I could use it," she said wryly. "We've got a full lineup today--there you go, Mr. Bryant, good as new," she added, giving the elderly man's leg a pat. He stood up and flexed the joint, then patted her head, greasy kerchief and all.

"Good lass, Rockbell. Leg hasn't felt this limber in years."

"Aw, it was nothing..."

One of the patrons guffawed. "You won't be thinkin' it was nothin' when that ol' pirate Dom hands you your bill!"

"Damn straight," was all Dominic had to growl about that.

"Win's work's the best in Rush Valley!" Paninya declared.

"Hardly," Winry scoffed. "Next!"

A dozen hands went up, waving madly. Ed caught himself staring as something altogether new dawned on him.

He'd gotten into the habit of thinking of Winry as someone who followed him, showing up when he needed her and going home to wait again.

The cheerful camaraderie here was a wakeup kick in the head. This was the life and the goals Winry returned to when she wasn't looking after him and Al, he realized, full of friends and good-as-family.

And today, it was Ed's turn to follow her home.


	47. Theme 47: Look Up & Look Down

**Theme 47 - Look Up & Look Down**

"Take off your shoes," Ed demanded.

Winry blinked, then turned a frown from him to the dripping wooden spoon in her hand. Edward sailing into the kitchen to interrupt whatever she happened to be doing--in this case, baking a pie--was hardly an unusual event, but this was an out-of-the-ordinary request, even for him. "What?" she managed.

"Your shoes." He was already unbuckling his, kicking them off and standing expectantly there in his socks, the tip of one automail toe peeping through a hole. "Take 'em off."

There was a smug grin lurking on his face, relishing some kind of juicy joke. Winry glanced at the bowl of pie filling on the counter, and propped her fists on her hips in exasperation.

"Buzz off, Ed," she scolded. "I'm busy, in case you didn't notice-"

"This'll just take a minute," he said obstinately.

She knew that look from long experience. No pie would be made until her shoes came off.

"Oh, whatever," she grumbled, slipping out of her sandals.

When she glanced up, there was an Edward in her face, practically nose to nose. Winry let out a yelp of surprise.

"The hell, Ed!" she exclaimed, stepping back, but he followed her, still grinning, still about an inch away. "What are you doing?"

"Look," he said, voice dripping with satisfaction. "We're eye to eye now."

"Gee, you think?" she snapped, edging away again. It was strangely uncomfortable to have him so close. She could see the faint hazel tracings in his irises, for God's sake, they were only about half an inch...

...down.

"Whoa."

"Yeah," Ed agreed proudly. "Another inch and you'll be looking up at _me_."

"If you can manage another inch, shrimp," Winry retorted. "You're almost nineteen, you haven't got much time left."

Ed scoffed. "You'll be fitting me for another adjustment in six months," he said, gesturing to his automail leg. "I'm having a _growth_ spurt."

"You're having an ego trip," Winry said, reaching up to ruffle his hair. "'Sides, I'm still taller."

He squirmed away from her hand. "I'm getting closer," he taunted, laughing, and as she reached again and he dodged, their noses--barely--bumped.

For a split second, they fell silent, staring at each other. Face to face. It really was just the slightest difference now. She could feel his breath on her lips...

He only had to tilt up his chin...

_"Too_ close," Winry said, making it flippant and teasing, and backed up a step, turning to stir her bowl of pie filling to hide her blush.

Behind her, Ed swallowed, awkward for a moment. It didn't last.

"Just give me a year," was all he said, reaching past her to stick his finger into the sugary goo she was mixing and popping a dollop into his mouth. "Mmm, blueberry!"

"Next time I'll look up a recipe for _bean_ pie!"

She scooped up a sandal to throw, but he'd already fled the kitchen, leaving his shoes behind.

.

* * *

_These stories were written out of order. This one was written a few years ago, and I'd like to lovingly dedicate it now to the wonderful fact that Edward has recently, finally, outgrown Winry in manga canon. : ) -tobu_


	48. Theme 48: Smiling Face

**Theme 48 – Smiling Face**

Al loves making people smile. He has a natural touch for it. But he's sensitive, always afraid of hurting others. And Ed is often tactless, but he's the stubbornest little cuss that ever roamed the earth. So it takes both of them to get through the first of their many quests. Forbidden alchemy and legendary stones can wait a few years. For now, they just want to see Winry smile again.

Neither of them has lost a parent, not really, so the bone-shattering grief that has carried their friend off and locked her in her room is still beyond them, but they're not about to be stopped by a little inexperience.

Their first venture into the Rockbell house is led by Alphonse, and therefore timid, a quiet tiptoeing up the stairs. A skill saw drones from Pinako's workshop. Winry's door is closed.

Al knocks lightly. "Winry?"

No answer. He tries again.

"Winry, c'mon out, okay? I brought you a flowe—"

The door cracks open a bit, revealing a slice of her scowling face.

"Don't _like_ flowers, stupid. Go 'way," she snaps, and slams it again. Al looks at the closed door and swallows hard. Ed recognizes the telltale signs of Alphonse Damage and hauls him home, reassuring him that they'll try again later.

"Later" comes the next day. This time the offering is a cookie, Winry's favorite.

"Not hungry," is her response this time, and the door slams again.

By now, Ed is getting sick of watching Al's face crumple. They decide drastic measures are necessary, and create another toy, a stuffed puppy. Al valiantly carries it upstairs, shining with hope.

When the door slams for the third time, Ed sees a tear trickle down his brother's cheek. This is the last straw. It's time for some Edward Diplomacy.

The door slams open_, _and one very angry six-year-old storms in. Winry sits up in bed, clutching her favorite wrench, shocked out of the cry she was in the middle of having.

"Will you quit slamming the dumb door already?" Ed yells, as Al watches in horror. "You're being stupid, and you made Al cry! We're just trying to help!"

Winry's fists are clenched. "You can't help anything_. _My parents—"

"I know!" Ed snaps back. "We're really, really sorry, okay? But quit taking it out on Al! If you need to hurt somebody to feel better, just hit _me!_"

She's hurting all right, and madder than a hornet, and it's not hard to impulsively take his word for it. The wrench lashes out. The next thing Ed knows, he's flat on his back with a skull that feels like it's been split.

A shocked silence descends on the room.

Then Ed coughs. Fair is fair. "Huh," he says, gingerly feeling the lump on his head. "You hit like a girl, you know that?"

Winry stares at him. Al stares at him.

And then, very weakly, the corner of Winry's mouth turns up.

It's the first step.


	49. Theme 49: Untouchable

**Theme 49 – Untouchable**

Everything seems slower now that she's pregnant. Her body, always predictable before, has become more solid, thicker, her center of gravity lowered so that she moves as if the air had been transmuted to heavy oil. Her movements these days are deliberate. She doesn't feel heavy, really; just full, like an overinflated tire.

She gets weird flashes of inspiration, as if whoever is being assembled inside her is tossing her new ideas, little thank-yous that pop up at two in the morning without warning.

Amongst all this fascinating newness, it takes Winry a while to realize that Edward has stopped touching her.

She ignores it at first, assuming that he's simply as confused by these changes as she is. But after the first kick startles her, she tries to get Ed to rest his hand on her stomach, to feel these fragile new flutters with her. He declines.

"I don't want to hurt it," he says, when she presses the issue. Winry laughs at that, rolling her eyes.

"Ed, you goose," she scolds. "Babies don't get hurt just because someone touches them." She reaches for his hand again, and he pulls away.

"Maybe other people's babies don't," he mutters, staring at the floor with a grim expression of buried dread.

She looks at him, and frowns.

And this is when they sit down—she pulls him to the sofa, really—and have a long, involved talk. They discuss the traumas of their shared childhood. Their mutual insecurities, fears of loss and death and betrayal. His own lasting issues with his father and uneasiness about becoming one himself.

His irrational semi-conscious belief that everyone he touches will wither. His mother, Alphonse, the people of Ishbal and Reole.

Her. Their child.

She alternately teases, coaxes, and beats some common sense back into him. He admits, under her stern gaze, that he has no intention of abandoning their fledgling family the way his father did; that death comes when it will, and there's no point living in fear of it. They're all lessons he learned years ago, but it never hurts to learn them again. She smiles at his secret fears, and he holds her close, and sighs his relief.

Evening falls on the two of them curled on the sofa, dozing off in the twilight since neither of them bothered to switch on the lights. She's nestled in his arms, her back against his chest, his arms snug around the rising curve of her vanished waist.

It wakes him just as he would have fallen asleep, the faintest of movements, barely tangible against the pulse in his wrist where it touches her skin.

Life, in a single tiny kick.

Winry stirs slightly, murmurs, "Feel that?" against his shoulder where her cheek is pillowed.

A wondering smile steals across his face. "Yeah," he whispers. "I felt it."

And they fall asleep, the three of them in one warm tangle, at peace together.


	50. Theme 50: Desire to monopolize

**Theme 50 – Desire to Monopolize**

_Munich, 1925_

The doors in their apartment are slamming open and shut, as Al sails from room to room, humming something happy and tuneless as he hunts for his other shoe. His hair is combed, he's got his best shirt on, and he actually bothered to iron his slacks.

Downstairs, curled in an armchair in the living room, Ed sinks a little lower into a blue funk. He doesn't have to wonder about the reason for all the festivities. He's already met her. She has big shy eyes and curly dark hair, and she is stealing his brother.

Footsteps clatter down the narrow stairs, and Al hops past him, pulling on his shoes as he goes. Ed catches a glimpse of the dreamy smile he wears. He sighs darkly and raises his book to block the view.

A moment later, fingers curl over the top of the book and tug it down, and he's confronted with his brother's quizzical face.

"What's wrong?" Al asks.

Ed makes a noncommittal sound and looks away, wishing he would let him go back to reading in peace. He doesn't want to spoil this for him, but…

Al's face tightens.

"Brother," he says, softly. "Don't do this. You always do this."

"Do what?" Ed asks, too cheerfully, trying to pull his book out of Al's grip. "I'm fine! Go have fun! If you want to put your neck in the noose and date a Jew, I don't see—"

The book is suddenly yanked out of his hands, and raps down sharply on the top of his head.

"Ow!" Ed yells, flinching back in more shock than pain. Al glares down at him, hands on his hips.

"Stop it!" he snaps. "You know that isn't why you're upset! Just because…"

He trails off, doesn't go so far as to say it, but his eyes soften and Ed sees the mixed sympathy and accusation there.

Just because you never really held her. Just because you still whisper her name in your sleep.

Just because you made a choice that, some days, you can't live with.

I am your brother, not your compensation, and not your companion into a lonely old age. I chose to be here for you, but I can't give up my chance at what you wouldn't let yourself have. You have no right to monopolize me, Brother.

Ed closes his eyes. He's right.

"Go ahead," he says, quietly. A smile curls his lips, and it's as real as he can make it. "Go have fun, okay? Tell her hi from me."

Al hands back his book, his smile returning slightly.

"Thanks, Brother," he murmurs, and bends down to press his cheek briefly against his. Ed doesn't open his eyes.

Footsteps cross the floor. The door clicks shut.

The book slips out of Ed's hand, thumping to the floorboards. He doesn't feel like reading anyway. That would require opening his eyes, and right now, memories are all he wants to see.

* * *

_Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. We have officially hit the halfway mark. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and for all your reviews, tips, encouragement, love and support; and here's to hoping I get the next fifty posted in a somewhat more timely fashion...and to the possibility of genuine canon EdWin hitting us before I finish. 3_

-Tobu

* * *


	51. Theme 51: Antipyretic

**Theme 51 – Antipyretic**

_The trouble with being—sleeping—on the road__  
Is bedtime prep consists of kicking off boots and pants and tumbling in  
He ditches his braid, but not the daily load_

_A bath or a book would be welcome distraction  
__To fade the marks and dim the memories waiting for him here in the dark  
The end of a day of military action_

_The same old dreams come nibbling at his eyes  
__Those creeping hands reach out to swallow him, mother's face accusing and gone  
He curls in a shamefaced shaking ball and cries_

_For he believes he doesn't deserve this peace  
The feel of clean sheets folded over him, boots tucked safely under the bed  
A misfiled sinner, waiting for heaven to cease_

_Yet someone somewhere wasn't afraid to touch  
To substitute the present silver for that which vanished into the void  
She trades her tears for his, she never asked for much_

_While lying trembling limbs in a tangle there  
His eyes shut tight to block the images trapped inside, it comes to him then;  
The scent of her lingers somehow in the air_

_And whether it's real or just another ghast  
Dreamed up by need, her warm and practical presence hovers over him now  
His shuddering fades, and he can sleep at last._


	52. Theme 52: “I won’t surrender”

**Theme 52 – "I won't surrender"**

Edward Elric never surrendered, not _ever._ He would keep fighting his adversaries until the last breath left his body.

He saw no reason to change his tactics, even when the adversary in question was blonde and blue-eyed and wielding a very large wrench, and intent on feeding him who-knew-what quack remedy. It was particularly unfair of her to have attacked him while he was at a disadvantage, thanks to the mother of all viruses that was nestling cozily in his throat tissues, keeping him too busy hacking up phlegm and reaching new heights on the Celsius scale to concentrate on arguing.

"Good god, Ed, what did you _do?" _Winry was complaining, stirring the contents of a plastic cup with irritated vigor as she sat next to his bed. "Your automail's completely shorted out and you've got the cold that ate Xerxes. You look like you went diving in Central Harbor with your grill unfastened!"

Another spasm of coughing was brewing; he swallowed hard before he answered, too distracted to think first. "It wasn't _unfastened_, it was just kind of loose."

Winry stared at him in disbelief. "Ed! It's January!"

"It wasn't my idea!" he protested. Winry sighed gustily and rolled her eyes, shoving the cup into his hand. It was warm, he noticed with some dismay, and full of pale yellow liquid that steamed ominously.

"It never is, is it," she commented dryly. "Drink that."

Ed wrinkled his nose. "Looks like a urine sample."

"Watch it," Winry warned, glaring down at him with an expression of irritated authority that Izumi would have applauded. "I could demand one, if this thing of yours turns out to be bacterial."

The look of horrified chagrin that transformed his face was downright comical. Winry lost it, leaning on the side table and laughing until she cried. Ed watched her with narrowed eyes. It didn't strike him as particularly funny, but then again, he was the one hacking his lungs out here.

"It's just honey and lemon syrup," Winry explained when she'd calmed down enough to speak. "It'll help with your cough. Now drink it, idiot, before I pour it down your throat for you."

Ed matched her glare for glare, stubbornly ignoring the cup in his hand. Winry sighed, and rubbed her temples.

"Ed. I know you feel like crap right now. Try cooperating with me for just a minute, okay? It won't kill you."

Her wounded tone was a blatant ruse, Ed decided. Nobody guilt tripped an Elric. And yet…

He snuck a sidelong look at her. She was still watching him. Goddamn big blue injured eyes.

Well. She was medically trained, anyway, so the chances of her poisoning him were slim. Besides, that spasm of coughing was fighting its way back up his throat again. He made a loud huffing noise, to prove that he was not going down willingly, and tipped back the syrup.

Edward Elric never surrendered.

But he did, occasionally, know when to negotiate a truce.


	53. Theme 53: Outcome

**Theme 53 – Outcome (of fighting)**

They were a typical pair of young military women, unremarkable in their pressed blue uniform skirts, and Winry would probably never have noticed them if they hadn't been trying so hard to smother their vicious giggles as she walked past them, looking her over with scornful eyes. As it was, they piqued her curiosity and suspicion enough for her to perk up her ears, just in time to catch a snatch of their whispered conversation as the blonde leaned over to murmur gleefully in the curly brunette's ear.

"…with that metal hand of his? It'd be like a visit to the damn gynecologist…"

Later that day, when she was in the HQ infirmary being lectured by Hawkeye on proper civilian conduct in a military building, Ed would demand to know what happened. Sitting on the exam table and gingerly holding ice to her split lip, she would tell him in a slightly muffled voice that it had been a matter of pride. He would ask nothing further after that; he knew all about wounded pride and the fist to someone's face that was sometimes necessary to salve it. Instead, the conversation would turn to how she was going to make good with the military brass enough to get let back on the premises again after having put two cadets out of commission, and the subject would not come up again.

But at the moment, in the middle of the flurry of righteously angry fists and feet, Winry wasn't sure if she was more furious at them for trampling her dignity, or his.


	54. Theme 54: Quick mouth

**Theme 54 – Quick Mouth**

It was one of those early fall afternoons that still feels like summer. Al was quietly eating apple slices in the middle of the kitchen floor, his legs straight out in front of him, as Ed stood on a stool by the counter messily cutting more with a blue gingham apron tied double around his small waist and trailing past his feet. Into the middle of this sunny scene of domestic tranquility sailed Winry, her canvas bookbag still slung over her shoulder. The screen door banged shut behind her.

"Learned something at school today," she caroled smugly, dropping the bag next to Al and sitting crosslegged across from him. Al looked up hopefully, as she casually swiped one of his apple slices.

"What is it?" the younger boy asked. A year behind the other two, he hadn't gotten to enter school yet, and was endlessly curious about what went on there.

"Tongue-twisters," Winry said, biting into the apple slice with a crunch. "'S a test ob how fash y'can talk," she continued through the juicy mouthful. "Y'try 'n shay 'em wiffou meshin' up."

"Try one like that an' you're gonna spray apple everywhere," Ed pointed out from his vantage point atop the stool.

"Yeah, like you've got any table manners," Winry shot back, but swallowed before pronouncing slowly and with great care, "'She sells seashells by the seashore.'"

"She sells…see…sell…" Al repeated, uncertainly.

"_Sea_shells," Winry corrected him. "Seashells by the seashore."

"Seashells by the sheeshore," Al said, and frowned. "That's hard, Winry."

"'S'not, it's easy," Winry laughed. "She sells seashells by the seashore," she added, faster this time. "There's lots of them. Here. 'I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit, and on that slitted sheet I sit.'"

Al screwed up his face in concentration, apple slices forgotten. "I slit a sheet…a sheet I split—"

"_Slit, _Al!" Winry interrupted.

"I slit a split, and on the sleeted…"

"Stop tryin' to make my brother say bad words," Ed warned, waving his apple parer at her. Winry stuck her tongue out at him.

"Betcha just can't say any tongue twisters, Sour Grapes."

That was a challenge. "Can so!" Ed snapped, drawing himself up indignantly. "I slit a sheet, I…darn it, how's it go again?"

"Can't remember such a _big _tongue twister?" Winry asked, smothering a giggle.

Edward's nostrils flared, as he paused just long enough to draw a deep breath, and then he was off, each perfectly enunciated word almost tripping over the one before it.

"WHO'RE YOU CALLIN' A TINY LITTLE BUG-SIZED MICROSCOPIC EENSY WEENSY STUNTED RUNTY HYPER MINI BABY BEAN BOY, JUST YOU WAIT I'M GONNA GROW SO BIG I'M GONNA PICK YOU UP AND PUT YOU ON THE ROOF 'THOUT EVEN TRYIN' AND THEN WE'LL SEE WHO'S LITTLE BEANY BABY TINY MS. SMUG FACE TONGUE TWISTER PUNY SCRAWNY—"

As Winry stared up at him with eyes like saucers, Al giggled.

"Winry," he said, "I think you just found the champion."


	55. Theme 55: Diffused Reflection

**Theme 55 – Diffused Reflection**

It was at the bottom of the box that they mailed to Risenburg, stamped and addressed to "Next of Kin Re: Major Edward Elric, SA". Winry hadn't been able to resist slitting the layers of yellowish tape, after she dragged it inside all damp with dew.

It looked like they'd finally cleaned out his lockbox at the military dormitories. He'd never kept anything important there anyway. He and Al were always traveling. Things that they needed frequently stayed in Ed's suitcase. Anything else was mostly already here at the Rockbells'.

The contents meant little to her, though she shuffled through them hoping for clues to his whereabouts: papers and photos and a half-used box of smudgy chalk. A few articles of clothing, black socks still wadded into a ball. He'd never bothered to fold his socks nicely. Winry wondered what they expected her to do with them.

She stacked the papers neatly as she unpacked them, planning to box them up again and forward them to Al at Izumi's to see if he could make any sense out of them. The photos she set aside for the family albums. The socks she left alone, for now, rummaging past them to the bottom of the box.

Her fingers brushed a fold of bulkier fabric, and she caught it and pulled it slowly out, like a magician with a neverending scarf, staring in surprise at her own trick. The overcoat settled into her lap in fold after heavy scarlet fold, still big enough for a boy twice his size and almost velvety soft after years of being ripped to shreds and transmuted back together. Winry wistfully traced the embroidered cross with a fingertip.

Then she stood, and slung it impulsively over her shoulders, slipping her arms into the sleeves. It trapped her body heat instantly, enfolding her in warmth, and she wondered how Ed stood wearing it in the summer. It must have been wonderful on chilly evenings, though, or as something to curl up in for a nap on a late-night train.

She smiled in spite of herself at that image, and spun around in the middle of the floor, her arms flung wide, feeling the heavy coattails lift and fly out behind her. It was almost like—

A movement caught her eye, and she stumbled and stopped her whirling, her heart thudding in her mouth. For a moment, she'd seen…

Golden hair in a ponytail, red coat flaring out behind. Her own reflection, distorted and blurry in the glass of the window.

Winry stood staring back at herself for a long, tense moment, eyes wide and dark in a suddenly pale face. Then she shrugged out of the coat, folding it carefully back into the box, with the chalk and the papers on top of it.

She could mail it to Al in the morning. For now, her steps turned toward the automail workshop. There was plenty of work waiting, and she had some serious steam to blow off.


	56. Theme 56: No Speaking

**Theme 56 – No Speaking**

He writes home frequently, but there are certain things they do not discuss.

For instance, parents.

It's an unspoken rule, but it's iron-bound. Exams are fair game, and missions are sometimes mentioned, in a carefully glossed-over way. Every stray kitten and late report and short joke is lamented in melodramatic detail. The doings of Al and his fellow soldiers and the Hughes family are always welcome.

But not those memories. Never mothers. Never fathers.

If they'd lost them in less spectacular ways, it might have been different. They might have been sources of comfort to each other, someone to talk out the old pain with, late into the night. As it is, the loss of both her parents in one day was such a blow to her psyche that she still shrinks into herself visibly at the mention of it. To bring up his father is to invite an explosive stream of infuriated profanity. And his mother…

Well. Neither of them wants to touch that subject.

So they comfort each other with their silence instead, talking of other things, careful not to tread on the pitfalls or open the unhealed wounds.

And when Winry suddenly stops responding to his mentions of Roy Mustang, in letters and conversations, Ed simply drops the subject, permanently, without asking questions. He assumes it has to do with the increasing, irritatingly paternal role the colonel has been taking in the Elrics' lives.

After all, there are certain things they just don't discuss.

For instance…parents.


	57. Theme 57: Haircut

**Theme 57 – Haircut**

If she wasn't going to say anything about my hair, she could have at least hidden the scissors. The damn stuff just kept _growing, _and Al always cut it for me after Mom couldn't anymore, and, well, Al sure as hell couldn't handle anything as delicate as a pair of shears yet. I was supporting him on almost everything he wanted to try doing, but I didn't want my eyes poked out. I was sick of needing help from Winry or Granny. And it was getting hard to see.

I guess that's how I ended up digging through the bathroom cabinets for the scissors.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

By the time I realized how damn hard it was to cut a neat line through my hair left-handed, with just a mirror to see what I was doing, it was way too late. Cutting hair is a lot harder than it looks. Do it the way you'd cut a handful of string or something, and you end up with all these funny flat-ended tufts that stick out weird.

That's…pretty much what I got.

Trial and error didn't help. I kept trying to fix it, and making it worse. I at least had the brains to start at the front ends, so I'd only hacked off about half of my bangs when Winry walked in and busted a gut laughing at me.

I did not, for the record, snap my tether and throw the scissors at her. I'm still kinda proud of that.

She trimmed it up for me, after she was done snickering like a moron. Had me sit down on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror and did it right, the way my mom used to, parted it with a wet comb and cut it with little twists of the scissors and everything. I'd butchered my bangs pretty good, but she managed to make something out of them. They were still jagged after, but it was an on-purpose kind of jagged.

It was actually kind of impressive. Not that I told her that or anything.

Granny dragged her off to help hammer something together before she could get to the back, so she gave me one of her hairties to keep it out of my face till she could find the time to finish…

Ha. By the time she remembered, my hair needed another inch hacked off. And I was kind of getting to like it long, so the bangs were all that went in the end.

Al trims it for me now. He got the hang of scissors, finally. I made him prove it on an old shirt before I let him near my face. But every so often, when we're home? Well, if she can maintain the leg I stand on and the arm I fight with, she can keep my hair out of my eyes, too. Right?

And, you know…frankly? She's got a touch for it.


	58. Theme 58: Difference

**Theme 58 – Difference**

Winry doesn't remember the moment she realized there were some rather significant differences between herself and her two dearest playmates. (Pinako does; it was in the bath—they often dumped all three into one tub, at that age—and it provoked some embarrassing questions and a lot of angry splashing from the Elrics, who did not take kindly to having parts of their anatomy labeled as "silly-looking" and "weird".)

She doesn't remember the point at which she refused to get in the same tub with them, or to change her clothes with them in the room. (It was mostly Nelly's fault for educating her about cooties, knowledge obtained courtesy of a slightly older cousin.)

She vaguely remembers jilting both of their marriage proposals, and the memory makes her smile; they were the last people she'd expected to pop her the question, and the first to do it, and the experience weirded her out completely at the time. (They'd trouped down to the general store the week before, allowances burning holes in their pockets, to join the other country kids in consuming prodigious amounts of soda and popcorn while they watched a black and white flick projected on the wall in the darkened back room. It had inspired both the proposals and one of the refusals; Winry liked the way the tall and handsome lead looked as he dipped his new fiancée back for a kiss, and couldn't imagine the maneuver being pulled off by someone shorter than her.)

But she clearly remembers, as clearly as if it were branded among the folds of her brain, a moment around the end of August in her twelfth summer. She remembers the click of her toolbox latch, and the familiar oily slide of the lid as she opened it; and she remembers glancing up from it as she did, and catching a glimpse of Ed as he caught his shirt hem in both hands and peeled it up over his head in one lithe motion, stripping down to have his shoulder joint adjusted.

She remembers the way her inexplicably riveted gaze slid unbidden down the curves of his back, slowly, like honey. And she particularly remembers the rush of prickly heat, the unfamiliar melting sensation that made her duck her head to hide a blush that caught her entirely by surprise; as she realized for the first time, in an entirely new way, that Ed was a _boy_.


	59. Theme 59: Study

**Theme 59 – Study**

Exhausted and sore after the energy surge of limb reattachment, he rested his buzzing nerves in the usual way, by collapsing onto the couch to sleep like the dead till dinner.

Winry waited till the others left. Then she settled gingerly on the edge of the couch, next to him, and quietly took inventory.

One dark, heavy bruise, plum-sized and -colored, tucked in the curve of his bicep. As if he'd been struck with something hard and blunt.

Three pale, fading splotches of greeny-yellow, scattered down the sturdy line of his forearm. Defensive bruises, small and old. Probably from sparring with Al. She hoped.

One pale pink pucker, still healing, just below the curved rise of his shoulder blade--he slept on his back, but she'd seen it while retuning his arm socket. A stab wound, from something thin and pointed, not bladed. Not deep, she assumed, or he wouldn't be here breathing softly on her sofa.

One bandage, small, plastered across his cheekbone and giving him a rakish look when he smiled.

One scraped knee, old enough to be scabby and flaking.

A patch of deep, reddish-purple bruising that spread down his thigh and ached to look at. Very fresh.

Gently, she brushed aside the silk of his bangs and counted three small cuts, parallel, disappearing into his hairline. There were more, she knew. Bumps, bruises, lacerations, hidden by hair and shirt and cotton boxers. Internal things, under the smooth muscles, inside the sturdy torso. Invisible wounds that cropped up only in his dreams and the occasional haunted look. As far as Ed went, today's crop wasn't bad. She'd seen him in much worse shape.

It was a fact she tried not to contemplate too much.

She rested her thumb lightly on the small bump beneath his hair that she'd left when he arrived, two days before. It had swelled into a hard knot on his scalp.

In the context of his perpetually battered body, she felt no guilt for that little lump. If she could teach him to think twice before he charged in, even if only in this language of bumps and bruises he had grown so fluent in...

Well. It was something to hope for, anyway. Winry sighed, shook out a blanket over her sleeping friend, and went to help with lunch.


	60. Theme 60: Dozing

**Theme 60 – Dozing**

"God, it's hot," he mumbles, and rolls over to stare up at the shadowy ceiling. Summer is cooking the mountains in Risenburg, an abnormally roasting-bright season this year, turning the grass crackly brown and the air into warm heavy water and eye-searing light. It's too hot to work, too hot to play, too hot to do anything but lie limp on the living room floor and feel each drop of sweat welling slowly from your pores.

There's a pitcher of ice sliding slowly down into clear muggy meltwater between them, and two glasses next to it. The windows are flung wide, the shades pulled down to keep out the brilliant sun, and thin bars of shockingly yellow sunlight are regimented across the dark floor. They curve and sigh over the shape of him, a sprawled tangle of sweat-damp golden skin and heat-dazed eyes.

She's curled on her side not far from him, breathing shallowly, with a cool chunk of ice melting slowly against the roof of her mouth. Every inch of her is itching warm and slick with perspiration, and she's long since kicked off her coveralls to bare long flushed legs. Fair enough, really, since he's been stripped to his shorts all day. She's not too tired to let her eyes play over him when he's not looking. He's tanned from being out in the sun, and his hair is loose and stuck to his face with sweat, and he's as languid as a cat and as beautiful as summer.

It's probably half the heat that's making her think this way. It's probably just as well she's too wilted to do anything about it. She could, of course, say something, if she was the sort who even knew how. _So, Ed, when did you learn to make my brain melt with your gorgeousness_, for example. Or maybe, _hey, Ed, I know you're an idiot and my best friend since we were kids and ridiculously short and all that, but right now I kind of want to have your children, is that okay with you?_

Except of course that would be stupid; the kind of stuff that she would never think of in a million years, let alone actually say. Besides, she's half-asleep right now. She'll probably wake up tonight and discover that he's gotten showered and pulled back his hair and put some clothes on, and become the irritable, annoying shorty that she's used to, and she'll be relieved that she didn't say anything.

Probably.

"Yeah," she mutters, instead, and dozes off again.


	61. Theme 61: Intuition

**Theme 61 – Intuition**

Ed prides himself on his intuition.

It's something you've got to have, to survive in a world like his; that sense of danger, the electric shriek at the edge of your consciousness that tells you somebody's lunging out of the shadows.

You need it, too, to perform alchemy without a circle; the ability to let go just enough to allow the power to direct itself where necessary, and focus instinctively on guiding the right amount into the fine details that it won't manage on its own, as your mind serves the purpose of the scribed directive lines inside the containing circle of your arms.

Yes, Ed's intuition is an impressive thing, honed to a sharpness that could split hairs, a sharpness that does split enemy bones and molecular bonds. He's learned to trust it utterly, to make instantaneous decisions based on its every whisper.

And now, sitting here among the rubble of the alley with the discarded handgun lying next to them, holding Winry tight as she sobs out her broken heart on his shoulder, he can't help wondering helplessly where it all went wrong.


	62. Theme 62: Hospital

**Theme 62 – Hospital**

I was awake, you know.

You thought I wasn't, and I can understand that. I must have looked so damn pathetic, half-dead even, lying there hooked up to all that equipment like some brat's broken doll.

(Say one word about miniatures and I'll shut up right now, I swear. I don't know why I'm telling you this anyway, except I owe you a few words that don't make you cry. I owe you…God, I owe you so much more.)

Anyway. You didn't know. I could tell, even looking at you through the haze of my eyelashes so you wouldn't see my eyes open. You know I don't like being stared at. You wouldn't have stood there so long and watched me if you knew I was watching back.

It's funny…it wasn't the staring that bugged me, that afternoon. It was equivalent exchange: you staring down, me staring up, both of us faking like we weren't. I kind of liked how you looked, all leaning up against the window with sunlight in your hair.

But I hated your tears.

Oh, come on. Don't give me that face, I've always hated how you look when you cry, even back when we were just kids, you know that. You're supposed to be tough, the scary automail prodigy who sleeps with a wrench and eats mixed bolts for breakfast, but when you cry your whole face just slips off at the seams and turns pale and weepy and crumpled and, I don't know. Alone.

It was such a goddamn _guilty_ feeling, knowing exactly who you were crying for and why, and lying right there in that bed looking back at you with dry eyes and pretending to be asleep, hating your tears. They made you look like somebody's victim, like one more casualty of collateral stupidity, and I couldn't take it, because it reminded me that you are.

You're mine.


	63. Theme 63: Every day

**Theme 63 – Every day**

It's funny, because he never spent that much time at her house to begin with. Even when they were kids, they played mostly outdoors or at the boys' house, which was spacious and sunny and not full of pointy tools. The only extended period he ever spent in her home was when he was rehabilitating from his automail surgery, just a few vivid months, not even a year.

So why is it that she's been living with the lack of him ever since?

She estimates it as ever since then, though she's not really entirely sure when the absence of Edward became a constant presence in her life. But she's sharply aware of it, so used to it by now that she hardly consciously thinks about it, any more than the location of her tools. Her favorite hammer and spanner are in the toolbox on her bedside table, her set of drivers is out on the workbench, and Edward is not-sitting at the table, not-standing in the hall, not-looking over her shoulder as she tightens the screws on a shin plate.

It's like being haunted by a quiet ghost, an Ed-shaped hole, a nonentity with all the tangible power of a real one. Instinctive by now: the glance into the boys' room where he isn't sprawled out reading a book, the pause as she passes the door to the kitchen where he isn't stealing a slice of pie. The brief hesitation before she lies down to sleep at night, and the moment of awareness that he isn't sitting on the foot of her bed, though she can almost see the space left by the air he pushed aside, the empty silhouette that's never faded since the one fleeting time he did.

It's as if his natural brilliance has branded him into her eyes, to swim before her constantly like the blurry afterimage of the sun until she can hardly turn around without consciously not-seeing him. Does he have this effect on everyone?

The one pleasant thing about it, she supposes, is that it's never too much of a stretch to get used to him when he makes his brief visits home. He's been there beside her all along, every day, in every room and breath and unguarded moment.

He just…hasn't.


	64. Theme 64: Straying

**Theme 64 – Straying**

In the course of repairing automail, the mechanic and the patient exchange a lot of physical contact. It seems like an obvious fact; but depending on the patient, it can be a nuisance or a source of significant entertainment for the discerning mechanic.

As far as any excuse to touch Ed goes, Winry isn't complaining.

Oh, it's not like she's into him or anything. Definitely not. He's Ed, after all, and that's just…well. It's not worth discussing. Not even worth bringing up. But he _is _a boy, after all, and he _has _been developing the most fascinating muscles. No harm in a little brush now and again, in the course of repairs, right?

His skin's amazingly warm to the touch, still young and buttery smooth, not like the weathered older men that limp in and out of the workshop day and night. He's so alive under her hands. Sometimes she wants to stop her tinkering and just press both palms unabashedly to the smooth curves of his shoulder blades, or slide her fingers down the tight slant of muscle from neck to shoulder; just to feel his soft skin, the powerful sinew it covers, the impressions of the bones beneath. She keeps it more subtle than that, of course. The last thing she needs is for Ed to stop trusting her to touch him at all.

It's good being a girl and a mechanic, though; among all that businesslike concentration, who's going to suspect you of stealing a touch now and then? Who would even notice an occasional tendency for your fingers to stray?

Certainly not clueless Ed, who stares silently at the wall the whole time he's being worked on, blank-faced as a stone and probably far away in some kind of alchemical reverie. Winry figures she's safe here, and smiles to herself as the pad of her thumb happens to brush his bare shoulder, as she shifts to get a better working angle on his arm port.

This system, of course, works both ways, and both of them are clueless as to the other's maneuvering. Little does she know how guiltily pleased Ed is at her apparent innocent carelessness; or why he really says nothing as he stares so determinedly at the wall.


	65. Theme 65: Departure

**Theme 65 – Departure**

It was frustrating. After all, he'd promised to tell her everything, back in the alley, partly just to calm her tears—but partly because Ed was an expert in owing, and he knew he owed her the truth. But once the story of Winry's parents was out (and damn, he'd never imagined how difficult a conversation could be when the girl across the table was so dear to you and in so much pain) Ed couldn't seem to say much else.

It was frustrating, particularly because there was still _something_ brewing. He could feel it, like an itch under the plate of his automail, maddening and unscratchable.

So many words had been spoken that day, most of them mistakes. His accusation in the alley, proof positive that he possessed the worst timing that ever existed. All those desperate reassurances while he uncurled her fingers from the pistol grip, tripping over each other and sounding utterly ridiculous. And then that horrible stilted conversation in the conference room.

Was it any wonder that Ed clammed up? That he'd stewed quietly through the ride back to the hotel, stood by in respectful silence while Winry talked on the phone, walked mutely behind her as they threaded their way through the crowded train platform?

But all that silence gave him time to think, and to observe. Especially that phone call. He'd gotten so used to hating it when she cried, that it took him all that stewing and brewing to figure out why the solitary tear she'd shed over the phone had made him….happy?

And now she was leaving, and he'd mumbled his goodbyes as she leaned out the window, and grunted an unrealistic promise to placate those pleading blue eyes, and any minute the train would pull out, and that brewing _something_ would never see daylight…

The words struggled out of his throat like bubbles forcing their way to the surface.

"Next time…"

She leaned back out the window to stare at him, and dammit, he lost it, the bubbles were popped and gone and so was Ed's nerve. He scowled, started to turn and go—

"What? I couldn't hear you! _Ed!"_

Maybe it was his name that did it. Maybe it was both of them calling after him, or her pleading, or the sound of the train chugging into life. Ed dug in his heels mid-stride, pulled a rapid military about-face that Hawkeye would have approved, drew a deep breath that was as much for courage as for volume:

"Next time I make you cry, they're gonna be tears of _joy! _Because Al and I are gonna get back to normal, and _that_'ll make you cry with _happiness!_ You got that?"

She laughed. He didn't blame her. But amongst the whispers as the entire platform turned to stare, he caught her murmur of, "Roger."

He still had the worst timing that ever existed, Ed decided. And he'd scored no points for eloquence. But better to time it terribly, than never at all.


	66. Theme 66: Different roads

**Theme 66 – Different roads**

When they're all three dumped in a washtub or on a picnic blanket together, they're like a giggling litter of something sweet and golden and preciously endangered, an indistinguishable trio ensemble of downy blond hair and chubby child limbs and round cheeks bunched up plump with laughter.

Their parents find it funny, counting off heads with smart taps, one-two-three, joking that they're going to have to start color-coding their clothes to tell them apart at a distance, calling them the three-headed monster and pretending to take Alphonse or Edward home by mistake instead of Winry. They play it up shamelessly, combining the power of their pleading for puppies and cookies and kisses goodnight, making it a habit to doze off contentedly at the end of the day in a sprawl of small cuddled bodies.

We found some neat books, Edward says one day, as comfortable as always, and Winry looks at the musty leather covers with their preservative smell and feels uneasy.

I think Granny wants me to go home, she says. I'm s'posed to help fix stuff…

And everything begins to change.


	67. Theme 67: This time once again

**Theme 67 – This time once again**

It was pouring rain outside, already dark on an autumn evening. Edward was out shoring up the dikes against potential flooding with half of the Risenburg villagers, presumably getting soaked and freezing. Winry was in her workshop, attempting to pry the caked dirt out of some careless client's grill plating, and thinking grimly of automail.

Ordinarily, the words "grimly" and "automail" would never share a sentence in Winry's vocabulary. However, a lot had changed since she and Edward started sharing a bed. Other people's automail still inspired delighted rants on structure and grace and general gorgeousness. Ed's, on the other hand…

The other hand. There was the issue in a nutshell.

He'd let her mill down the edges on his joints—insisted on it, actually—after their first few semi-disastrous attempts. (Al poked his dear blond little head in on that 'repair' session and asked curiously what was wrong with the automail; she thought fast and told him, quite truthfully, that she was making it more ergonomic, which made Ed sporfle into his water glass—he'd been pretending to drink to hide his tomato-red blush.) Things got much better on the accidental-bruises-and-pinches front after that; but the recent weather, and the amount of time Ed was spending out in it, had exacerbated a recurring problem.

Few things kill a mood faster than metal limbs that feel like they just came out of the deep-freeze.

Winry absently stirred the oil bath where she'd dumped the offending grill to soak out the grit, thinking hard. They couldn't take his limbs _off_. Hours of reattachment agony were not fair equivalent trade. The automail was going to be their bedfellow, no matter what; it was a matter of learning to work around it.

The rain battered against the windowpanes. It was pitch-black outside, and the wind was shrieking audibly, and he still wasn't back. It looked like this time once again she would be dealing with an Ed who could hold ice cubes without melting them.

Three times in three nights. It was getting ridiculous.

She rolled her eyes, fishing the grill out of the oil with a pair of tongs. It steamed slightly as she let it dangle and kept thinking absentmindedly. If there was just a quick way to warm his limbs up to a bearable temperature, short of making him sit still while she ran a hair dryer on him...not the most romantic of scenari—

Steaming slightly.

Winry almost dropped the tongs. _Duh_, with a side order of _eureka._

A quick check of the clock on the wall confirmed it. Just enough time to finish this project, and have a nice hot bath run and waiting when he got home.

She couldn't help grinning rather smugly as she went back to work, satisfied with her solution. Efficient, relaxing, and actually good for him after all that trudging around in the cold and the wet.

And who knew? If they were lucky, there might be room in the tub for two.


	68. Theme 68: Search

**Theme 68 – Search**

he only wanted a drink of water, but he must not have slipped into the kitchen quietly enough.

he hears soft bare footsteps on the stairs and turns. she glows in the moonlight with no lights switched on, standing aimlessly out there in the dim hallway. she seems almost transparent in her white nightgown, swaying slightly.

she doesn't speak, though he waits for it. she watches the air between them blankly, and it takes him a moment of disturbed confusion to realize she is sleep-walking. she used to, sometimes, when they were children and she fell asleep still restless. the memory makes him smile, and he relaxes and approaches quietly, waving a hand in front of unresponding eyes.

hello.

hi, she says, all wispy-voiced through the veil of dreams.

what're you doing up so late?

she wobbles, a bit disoriented, hand feeling uncertainly for the doorframe to steady herself. searching, she says, after what looks like a moment of deep consideration.

he grins. what're you searching for? he asks, curious despite his amusement, and she swings around and suddenly gazes right into him with luminous, sleep-clouded blue eyes.

you, she says, softly, matter of factly. you went away somewhere.

he laughs, uncomfortably. not sure how to react to this. idiot, he whispers, suddenly afraid to wake her. i'm right here.

but she shakes her head slowly. no, she says, thoughtfully. you went away. you're still somewhere else. i couldn't follow…but i'm looking for you.

she smiles a sad distant little smile.

maybe if i try i can find you, all the same, she adds, and reaches out a thin hand turned blue in the moonlight, to not quite touch his cheek.

as if a glass wall separates them.

he wonders why he suddenly feels like crying.


	69. Theme 69: Not know

**Theme 69 – Not Know**

In hindsight, she really should have thought of a better way to cover it. Something less obvious. There must have been better plans than just buttoning her coveralls up to the neck and hoping for the best.

But Winry was such a creature of habit; and Edward's whole profession relied on sharp observation. There wasn't much she could have done.

She still felt guilty.

Edward breezed downstairs whistling tunelessly, so content for once; which just turned the screws a little deeper when he paused in the kitchen doorway.

"What's up?" he asked, puzzled, and Winry managed not to wince.

"Making breakfast," she said, and she must have sounded too innocent, or too monotone—she was always a terrible actor—because his eyes narrowed.

"Not that," he said. "Why're you all buttoned up?"

They both knew Winry only wore her coveralls closed when she was working, for protection, unfastening the top to sling around her waist as soon as she took a break. The fabric was sparkproofed, thick and oppressively hot, and it was June.

"Uh-h…no reason," she said, floundering lamely for something better to say and coming up empty-handed. Nervous tension stiffened her shoulders.

"You're hiding something," Ed said, uneasy. "Did you hurt yourself?"

"Not exactly," she blathered, and hated herself for it—stupid, _stupid, _learn to lie!

His unease turned to worry. "Let me see."

There wasn't any point, she knew that; she couldn't wear her coveralls for the next week. Reluctantly, she unbuttoned, shrugging back the top, and as he started to walk toward her, he saw it.

The blurred, reddish-purple marks of four fingers, dug deep just below her left shoulderblade.

The color drained out of Ed's face in that instant. Winry's heart sank_._

"Oh, shit," he said, shocked. "I hurt you."

"You didn't mean to," she protested, reaching out to him; he flinched away. "Ed…it wasn't your fault…"

He wasn't listening, pale with growing horror. "Dammit, I can't even…!"

She'd hoped so hard he wouldn't notice. He hadn't noticed then, when she cried out; she was never the world's quietest partner between the sheets, and a sharp gasp and a slight arching of her back was nothing new, easy to explain away…but bruises bloom overnight, no stopping the flush of blood under the skin…

Trying to soothe, she went to him, wrapped her arms around him; he struggled away at first, but allowed her to hold him; his turn to be tense, nervous. She noticed how careful he was not to let his automail touch her, as if the metal would burn her on contact.

"It's okay," she murmured, wanting to pull that arm around her waist too, and knowing he wouldn't let her. "It's just a bruise, it doesn't matter."

"What if it happens again?" he whispered.

Ideas, ideas…she kept talking, too many words, blotting out the truth.

_I don't know, Ed. I made this 'mail. I can take a few bruises, now and then; but can _you?

_I just don't know._


	70. Theme 70: Share

**Theme 70 – Share**

It's a pleasure to braid Ed's hair.

Even setting aside all context for the braiding, with her grudging affection for him completely canceled out, it would still be a pleasure.

Winry has no idea how it stays so nice, but she's willing to bet it's luck, possibly the only luck he possesses; she cannot imagine Ed taking any special care with his hair, no matter how nice it is. And, oh, it is. It's heavy and silky-smooth, like the tassels on the curtains at a posh mansion where she once made a house call. There's a buttery gold sheen and a tangible weight to it that makes her want to forget braiding it and just bury her hands in its rich wealth.

She doesn't, though—who knows what Ed would make of that? It's rare for him to even ask. Normally, when his arm is damaged, he just gets Al to ponytail it loosely for him.

Tucked up crosslegged behind him as he fidgets on the sofa, she's dawdling over the last few inches, making sure the thick sections of hair weave just so. Finally, she taps his shoulder, and he holds up his hairtie in silence.

Stretching it out in her fingers to tie off the braid, Winry stops, and stares at the rubber band. It's weathered and cracked and showing every sign of being about to disintegrate into little pink bits like the leavings of a pencil eraser.

"Ed," she complains, nudging him in the side with her knee. "This thing is way past its expiration date. Don't you have any others?"

"Just that one," he says, and she snorts.

"Should have thrown it out a long time ago," she says. "Couldn't afford fifty cens to buy a packet of rubber bands? Or did you lose them all?"

Ed shrugs, shooting an oddly uncomfortable glance over his shoulder. "Never used any others," he mutters.

Winry stares at him in confusion, until the full meaning of that sinks in. "Oh, Ed," she says, finally, in tones of weak disbelief. "You're telling me this is the same hairtie I gave you when you first started growing out your hair?"

He nods, uneasily.

"Well, that was only three years ago," Winry says, bewilderment coming out as biting sarcasm. "Why bother getting a new one when the old one's got spring left in it?"

He looks about to growl, so she gets up quickly, handing him the end of the braid to hold, along with the ancient rubber band.

"Stay there, I'll get you a new one," she says, heading for the door. "Don't bother thanking me, what's mine is yours and all that. Seeing as you like hairties so much and all. Jeez, I've had tools I junked faster."

He doesn't follow or protest, but she glances over her shoulder in time to see him slip the band into his pocket.

To throw it away later, she assumes as she leaves.

There's no way Edward Elric has started being sentimental.


	71. Theme 71: Every once in a while

**Theme 71 – Every once in a while…**

"Say something," she gasped into the damp curve of his shoulder, and he hesitated, warm skin sliding against hers as he shifted back in surprise.

"What?"

Her arms tightened, pulling him close again. "You heard me."

"But—" A strangled whisper, breath against her lips; one callused hand and one of heated metal carefully spanning her waist as her legs knitted snugly round him. She covered his objecting lips with hers, arguing silently for the favor with a tender nip. "Say _what?"_ he pleaded as she drew back.

"Anything," she said, with a shivery sigh. "My _name_, I don't know…"

He balked at that, skin flushing a shade brighter.

"Please," she whispered, and he gulped.

"Wi…"

He was stammering, bewildered, caught out of the blue. She coaxed the rest of it out with a clever shift of her hips—she was getting better at this, she'd had the rest of him mapped in her mind for years, just one more list of points of disassembly to tweak—and he arched with her, those golden eyelashes fluttering, beaded with sweat.

"Winry…!"

"Mm," she agreed, twined warm around him as their hair tangled on damp shoulders. The rhythm was back now, his automail slick and warm as they moved with each other; always an element of grinning shameless competition, when it was like this, playful tussling in a give-and-take race to the finish—

It came again, unbidden as her lips seared his neck, "Winry!"

And a muffled noise of assent from her; they were rising up together, her fingertips dug ten tight points in his back as they rocked and shuddered—

"Winry," he cried, like a clarion call, "Winry, Winry—_!"_

His throat was open this time, mid-word, and the sound rose up and caught him by surprise, and burst from him in a full-throated wordless shout, something triumphant and primeval. She grinned fiercely, with a sense of satisfaction as heady and dizzying as the lights bursting behind her eyes. He was always a shouter—she supposed it was no surprise, as loud as he was—but he strangled it, clamped his mouth shut, smothered his lips against her neck in the crucial moment.

Embarrassment, perhaps, or shyness, or something else, a mix of many things. She didn't know if it was typical, he being her first (her only), but it had worried her from the start. Being a mechanic, she knew all about corked pressure and the kind of results you don't like.

She'd set her mind to the problem.

It had worked, in any case. They relaxed, slumping back against the rumpled sheets. He breathed deep and steady, now, in the glow of release; a blush crept bright across his face, and he ducked his head sheepishly and laughed. She let out her own last trembles in a sigh, tracing the curve of his cheek with lazy fingers as they spiraled slowly down together, and decided that she liked it.

Edward was always better breathing free.


	72. Theme 72: Insect repellant

**Theme 72 – Insect repellant**

Summer time is picnic time, always has been.

Winry realizes right off, during their early visits home, that it's going to be her job to keep track of things like that, because Edward seems determined to peel off home like the scabs around his spanking-new docking ports and Al would ditch his own head if Ed told him to.

This is baloney and Winry knows it. Just because they've been gone for months to who knows where, just because flesh has been lost and pasts supposedly left behind, doesn't change the fact that the day is shimmery-hot and there's watermelon in the icebox and the river is beckoning.

So she resolves to pause Ed's repairs for the afternoon. She hauls the dusty picnic basket out of the shed, knocks the spiders out of the corners and lines it with fresh newspaper, scoops potato salad and leftover pasta into metal bowls to cover with plastic wrap, and smears spicy mustard and tunafish in generous layers on white bread with crusts cut off. She remembers the crusts, and to pack extra potato salad but leave the ice cream. She nearly packs grapes until she remembers they're Al's favorite and that's not a good thing anymore.

Ed comes into the kitchen while she's busy hacking a juicy wedge out of the watermelon, still cold from the icebox. He leans on the table and surveys her mess.

"What the hell is this?" he asks, suspiciously, and she swats at him with a dishcloth stained melon-pink.

"A picnic," she says.

"What for?"

"It's summer," she reminds him, dumping the dripping melon slice into a plastic bag and twisting it tight. The basket is getting incredibly heavy. "We always picnic in summer. Where's Al?"

"Hey, this is a _repair session, _not a vacation," Ed starts to protest, but she's had enough of his idiocy and grabs for the grocery clipboard, scrawling a note on a stray leaf of paper and shoving it firmly between the top slats of the basket.

WINRY'S PICNIC. NO TOUCHING. THIS MEANS YOU ED.

"Fine," she says, lugging the basket in both hands as she heads for the door. "I'll eat it myself."

He follows, his contrary nature as triggered as she hoped it would be.

"You'll get sick," he points out. "And what's _that_?" he adds, oh-so-scornfully pointing at the note.

Winry grins a wicked grin. "Insect repellant," she says, and runs for it, heavy basket and all.

He lets out a bellow, reliable as clockwork, and follows hot on her heels, shouting incoherently out into the summer air. She can hear Al clanking after them from somewhere in the backyard, and turns her running steps towards the river road with a sense of profound satisfaction.

Ed in a harmless tantrum, Al laughing as he chases them both, an inevitable capture, and herself triumphant, with watermelon waiting to be shared.

For these brief moments, everything is in its place again, the way it used to be; and her job is done.


	73. Theme 73: Handmade

**Theme 73 – Handmade**

It's a sad but simple fact that Winry's hands are ugly.

When she was younger, just starting to come into her womanhood and beginning the blossoming body-roulette that would turn her out pretty or plain, it used to bother her. She's long since gotten over it, though. You can't be a mechanic and have pretty hands. Not without more fuss and trouble than she's willing to expend.

So, Winry's hands are tough, with callus across her palms and the insides of her fingers. She rubs lotion into them now and then, on the rare occasions when she remembers, but tough hands are convenient in her line of work, so she mostly lets them be.

She can't wear her thick leather gloves all the time—they're no good for delicate work—and so there are scars as well, fresh and pink, pale and fading. They're latticed here and there across her hands, curled around her fingers like rings. She caught the web of skin between thumb and finger in a jigsaw once, sliding a pattern through it with her fingers splayed to hold it steady, and it healed unevenly, leaving a pucker.

They aren't flaws you'd notice from a distance. But they're quite visible with a close look. Waiting for her drink at a coffee shop once, she was looking at the cakes on display with her hands pressed against the glass when the woman next to her gave a shudder of surprise and asked her what on earth she'd done to herself.

It wasn't an isolated incident, either. The older Winry gets and the better she becomes at replacing others' hands and feet, the more of a patchwork her own hands become, and the more she gets used to explaining them. But she's less and less self-conscious, as well. Her granny's old hands are a mosaic of ancient injuries under the wrinkles, but they're as strong as steel pincers at an age when most women's are beginning to turn brittle and shaky. That's a very fair equivalent trade in Winry's eyes, and she's fond of her battered hands, no matter how ugly some fools may think they are.

She can at least trust Ed not to recoil. He knows the real value of a hand, after all.

It's what you create with one that counts.

* * *

_A/N: In honor of the completion of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, and in thanks for six years of joy and entertainment, I'll be finally completing the Themes this summer, as well. I can't promise a new Theme per day, but I'll try. There will be manga spoilers. You have been warned._


	74. Theme 74: First snow

**Theme 74 – First snow**

_You've got to come see it here, _he wrote to her on Tucker's best drafting paper, _it's snowing like crazy…_

And it was true—after a childhood in Resembool, the amount of snow in Central City boggled Ed's mind, that first winter. Tucked in a sheltered river valley at the foot of the mountains, Resembool got one or two light dustings of snow a year, just enough to turn the grass white and tantalize the kids with fruitless promises of the snowmen and forts they'd read about in books or seen in films.

Ed still had a vague wisp of memory of the first time he'd seen a real snowfall, when he was five. An unusually brisk winter had resulted in a few inches of white fluff actually sticking, and he and Al and Winry had been bundled up snugly and shooed out to play in it. He remembered the way their laughter came out strangely muffled in the crisp air, and his fingers turning pink and numb, and Winry's stubborn insistence that they make a snow dog rather than a person, and the prickly spluttering iciness of having snow smushed in his face by Al, who was too small to pack a real snowball and so found his own ways of fighting back—and cocoa afterwards, all three of them wrapped up in the same wool blanket by the fireplace as Mother oohed and aahed out the window at their lopsided snow beasts.

All three of them waited eagerly for the rest of the winter for snow to fall again, noses pressed up and fogging the window glass every time a promising cloud rolled in, but it never did.

Central City's snowfall per annum was enough to bury Al in, armor and all, and most of it seemed to have descended stubbornly on the streets and rooftops over the last few weeks and refused to melt. The Elric boys had already entertained themselves thoroughly in it, running and skidding and throwing snowballs, and helping Nina build a snow Alexander (then rebuilding it when the real thing happily knocked it over). Even Al, unable to feel the cold, had laughed like the kid he still was and satisfied tradition by washing Ed's face with snow as Nina shrieked and giggled.

Still…

Sitting up to look out the window at the remains of their snow creations, Ed smiled wistfully and leaned his cheek on his automail hand, remembering the little pink fingers that once were, and another long-ago snow dog.

_Honestly, I mean it, _he added, with careful loops of the pen._ Al misses you, and… _He paused, trying the phrasing half a dozen ways, before finishing.

…_snow just isn't the same without you._


	75. Theme 75: Someday

**Theme 75 – Someday**

Everybody's got their muse, right? Somebody they do what they do for.

I think you might be mine.

I'm pretty sure Al's yours, or maybe your mom, and that's fine by me—it's not like I really need anything from alchemy anyway, though it would be nice if you'd get around to fixing those creaky floorboards in the hall, or at least learn to avoid them when you sneak downstairs to raid the fridge and wake me up with it. I don't need to be your inspiration; honestly, I don't really want to be, it would be awful to think I'm the reason you keep running off trying to get yourself killed.

But…it sounds weird to say, but…jeez. You're not the reason I got started with automail, duh, but ever since you gave Granny and me that _look, _like you were a grown-up man and not a torn-to-shreds kid, and said, "One year," and then went and actually did it? I've wanted to…help you, I guess. I still wanna make the best automail the world has ever seen, but now? Now, I wanna put it on you, and see your face when it comes to life.

So yeah, don't get a fat head about it or anything. But you're kind of my _raison d'etre, _as Garfiel says.

And if I could study a hundred years, lock myself in my room till I was old and withered and apple-brown like Granny, and one day come shuffling out with the secret to make you whole again clutched in my bony old fist…well, I guess you'd be too ancient to help much by then, wouldn't you?

But it's a nice thought, all the same.


	76. Theme 76: Telephone

**Theme 76 – Telephone**

"Hi, Al. Where's—oh, really. Well, if you see him, let him know I need to give his leg a checkup, would you?"

"Ah, Sergeant Major Fury! I'm kind of in a rush, when you get to the Colonel's office can you tell Brother that Winry needs to give him a checkup?"

"Not here? Well, um…could you take a message, Lieutenant Hawkeye? Miss Rockbell says she needs to check up on Major Elric."

"As long as you're taking that paperwork down to the General's office, Sir, keep an eye out for Edward, would you? Let him know Miss Rockbell needs to check on him."

"Lieutenant Breda! Just the man I wanted to see. Take these down to the General's office posthaste. Oh, and tell Fullmetal his mechanic needs to check him out."

"Havoc! What's up! Yeah, the Colonel dumped his paperwork on me again. Oh hey, and according to him, Fullmetal's mechanic wants to check him out…!"

"Damn alchemists, landing any girl they take a shine to! I'm askin' you, ladies, whaddaya see in their ritzy-fitzy parlor tricks? Even Elric's got that cute mechanic checking out his moves…"

"Who, Major Elric? Nah, he's only fifteen, and short to boot—and besides, I heard that mechanic of his has been checking out his assets, if you know what I mean."

"HEY, ELRIC! YOUR MECHANIC THINKS YOU'VE GOT A HOT ASS!"

Oh, how the vengeance flowed in Central Headquarters that day.


	77. Theme 77: Unsaid

**Theme 77 – Unsaid**

_You're the best person to be with, besides Al and Mom. Dunno why. Maybe 'cause you're nice to Al. Maybe 'cause you're not dumb like a real girl. Maybe…maybe 'cause you know me better'n anybody, except them. Dunno._

Boys are stupid. You're stupider. Somebody's gotta make sure you don't stupid yourself to death, right?

_ All is the world. One is me. If I'm the ant, and Al's the leaf I'm carrying, what does that make you? The blade of grass supporting me? The hill I'm going home to?_

Granny says she doesn't know if you're ever going to come back and stay back, and I told her I'll hit you if you don't, and she laughed at me. How else am I s'posed to get you to stay put? It's not the same without my best friends.

_ Promised myself I wouldn't ask you to come until I had to. Took me six months to get smashed up enough to call it necessary. Wasn't happy about it, until I saw you waiting in the doorway. Felt better somehow, then._

You're not here, but you're not gone. You're in every reflection off every limb in my room and you won't go away, and sometimes I catch a breath of your scent and can't help turning my head like my dork of a dog trying to find it again, that wisp of you.

_Some days I look at my hand and I want to just…hold it or something, which is really goddamn weird. I mean, most of the time it's just something to punch with and hold things with and swipe the sausages out of the frying pan while they're still hot with, but then I look at it and it's…I don't know._

You drive me crazy, but I think sometimes you keep me sane.

_Sometimes I can't breathe, knowing how made by you I am._

Where do you get off turning up one day and suddenly not looking like a stunted dandelion anymore, anyhow? You could have warned me. Sent me a letter or something. Dear Winry, the weather in Central is fine, Al says hello, and I have swallowed the Mystical Stone of Handsome and will shortly be making your eyeballs fall out when we next come to call, sincerely Ed. Dammit.

_I missed you._

I don't understand how anyone can be the world's biggest idiot and biggest genius at the same time, but you are.

_I'd like to pour the world into your lap, march up to you glowing with pride and clap my hands and have everything up to the stars spill out of them into your waiting arms. Hell, I'd like to just see you._

Don't know what I'd do without you. Be normal, I suppose.

_You're amazing._

I love you.

_I'm sorry._

I'm sorry.

* * *

And of course they can't say any of it. And of course they don't really want to. And until they can and do, if they ever can or do…they find other ways to let it show.


	78. Theme 78: Equal

**Theme 78 – Equal**

At seven, Ed can climb up the creaking old branches of the apple tree and wave with both arms, holding on to the tree with legs only while Al goggles with delight and Winry vents her jealousy by shouting bossily for him to get down from there right now.

Winry can run fearlessly at the diving hawk as Ed shouts from the tree for her to hurry, swinging a stick at it with both arms, for lack of a wrench, and shrieking for it to buzz off.

Ed transmutes a tiny woven nest out of the longest and softest grass, which makes Winry grumbly-stomached with envy.

Winry has the gentle, precise hands to lift the baby birds painstakingly into the nest as Al holds it out, careful not to bruise their gawky necks and bare flopping wings as they cheep pitifully.

It only takes a quickly-scraped array in the dirt with one of Ed's fingertips to open up a tiny grave for the savaged mother bird, and to gather the sand in the earth around them into a round stone to put on top.

Winry's tome of animal medicine has the formula for a gruel to feed the poor skinny things, and Winry has the experience to mix it and feed it to them with a hollow straw without Granny or Trisha even having to supervise.

Ed is far better at researching, digging through their collection of books on nature and looking up the species of the mother bird, and pointing out to a delighted Al the delicate, hollow structure of the wing bones, the layers of the feathers, and how they'll let the full-grown birds soar into the air.

Winry has been on enough long projects with her granny to manage stoically sitting up late into the night and feeding the weakly chirping babies, while Ed and Al doze off at the kitchen table, rubbing their eyes sleepily and doing their valiant best to stay awake.

But when the final remaining baby bird breathes its last, three exhausting days later, neither Ed nor Winry knows how to comfort Al as he bawls heartbrokenly over the tiny fluffy bodies. They exchange helpless looks as the tears pour down his cheeks, then wrap their arms tight around him from each side, both of them stubbornly hiccupping back their own sobs to comfort him.

Trisha will have to give them a gentle 'everything dies' talk, later, when the three of them calm down. Grief has closed both of their throats, and despite their best efforts and all their greatest talents, there is nothing either Ed or Winry can do to help their birds, or their brother, now.


	79. Theme 79: Are you drunk?

**Theme 79 – Are you drunk?**

The phone rang, shattering a perfectly good dream, and Winry felt a brief, overpowering urge to smash it. On the tail of that impulse, she remembered what a nuisance telephones were to repair, and transferred that violent impulse to whoever had the nerve to call her at this ungodly hour of the night.

Rolling over, she fumbled for the receiver on her nightstand and brought it unsteadily to her ear, wondering who would be suffering for this.

"Winry? He….hey! Winry! 'Zat you?"

Nevermind. Unfortunately for both of them, her caller was apparently already smashed.

"Edward…?" she slurred, nearly as incoherent as he was. "D'you have any idea how _late it is?"_

"No!" Edward cheerfully admitted. "But—oh, hey! Guess what! So, I was reading—"

"It's _three in the morning," _Winry growled. She'd been afraid of something like this ever since she'd heard of her friend's plans for his eighteenth birthday. Well, maybe not a rude awakening, specifically, but any celebratory night on the town conducted by Edward's military buddies was going to involve alcohol and plenty of it. She'd hoped Ed would have the sense to decline; but either his common sense had taken the night off, or he'd fallen prey to some kind of 'friendly' plot, because from the sound of it, he was three sheets to the wind and sailing.

At least he was somewhere with books. Books generally meant safety.

Ed was still babbling right over her protests without pausing. "—is born a noble and rich queen, whom the Philosophers liken unto their daughter, and, she, um, is free of all impurity and hurt! She gives, uh…wait, no, there is nothing on the face of all the Earth that can be compared to her, for which—"

"Edward," Winry wearily interrupted. "What are you yattering about?"

"Guess!" he exclaimed.

So Ed was a cheerful drunk. Well, better than hideously depressive. Winry rubbed the bridge of her nose, beginning to feel almost hung over herself.

"Me?" she suggested, wryly.

Edward snorted a laugh. It was not a dignified sound. "No-oo-oo! It's the Answer of, of Luna the Queen, from the Rosarium Philopha…sopha…sorum! You know, the concept of silv—"

"Oh, how silly of me," Winry muttered. Not funny to begin with, the phenomenon of getting drunk-dialed by Ed was rapidly losing whatever charm it had at first possessed. "Look, Ed, I'm tired—"

"But I—but, yeah," Ed interrupted her, then somehow himself, "it is kinda you! I guess."

_Argh. _"Go to bed, Edward," Winry moaned.

"Because…you know, because you're you," he continued, earnestly, if a bit inarticulately. "And…and how nothing on the face of the…yeah. That bit."

The corner of Winry's mouth twitched. "Go to bed, Edward," she repeated, and set the receiver down firmly, trying to keep the smile off her face and mostly succeeding. People said all sorts of stupid things when they were drunk. Edward probably wouldn't even remember this in the morning.

But Winry had a feeling she might.


	80. Theme 80: Paradox

**Theme 80 – Paradox**

Sometimes Ed dreams that they never unlocked their father's study or even found that first primer at the back of the bookshelf, that they wept bitterly over their mother's grave and then lifted their chins with grace and kept on living, that they grew up sturdy and strong and whole under Pinako's wise grandmotherly gaze.

That they grew up. That they grew apart. That the three of them became brother and brother and childhood friend, that they called sometimes on the phone when Ed wasn't busy at graduate school in Central and Al at veterinary school near Resembool and Winry neck-deep in internship commissions in Rush Valley, none of her clients quite so blonde or short-tempered or familiar as they might otherwise have been.

That they faded out of each others' lives, as people do who take each other and their own simple happiness for granted.

Amazing, how the path through so much unmitigated hell has somehow led them so very much, in the end, to each other.


	81. Theme 81: Jealousy

**Theme 81 – Jealousy**

There are shelves in Winry's workshop, and in their corners are crammed the albums, heavy things bound in faded blue canvas covers, with pounds of crackly pages inside pasted from edge to edge with glossy old photographs. She drags them out onto the dusty floor some days, arms full of the sheer weight of her past, and she looks through them hungrily…

Her mother's soft handwriting loops _summer 1899 _across the one empty spot on a page crammed with images of the two of them as infants, dozing in the grass or sharing a blanket on the floor, too tiny and pink and new to do anything but drool contentedly, barely old enough to notice each other. Soft shadows from a tree overhead dapple the silky baby hair that nearly matches.

She carefully turns a chunk of pages and finds him and her and Al, just shy of preschool, all three of them magnificent in lipstick red like strawberries and an all-star collection of Trisha's best beribboned hats and heels, clomping proudly around the living room that would later burn down to its charred foundations.

Another half-dozen years pass in a shuffling of thick paper, and they are preteens, him propped back on his elbows on the kitchen floor and her kneeling in front of him, both of them helpless with laughter as he pedals his mismatched feet against her hands as if she was a human bicycle, a brief glowing moment of happiness among the early physical therapy exercises…

It's all she can stand for today.

Winry shuts the album carefully, dust puffing from between the covers, and buries her face in her hands. She's a refugee, hoarding her last scraps of nourishment against slow inevitable starvation; because he is gone, and she looks at the wealth on these pages from the cold vantage of long years in an empty house. And she knows she shouldn't, but she does; she hates—she _detests—_the younger self on these pages, for not relishing every morsel, every second, of what they once had.


	82. Theme 82: More

**Theme 82 – More**

_The world has been drowned in pitch, a darkness so complete it gums her eyelashes together and slithers between her stumbling feet. Winry knows this darkness, and she dreads what it brings._

_ A faint murky light appears, reddish and flickering, and she runs toward it until her feet fling splashes into the air and she smells the rusty tang of blood and looks down._

_ He's there, helplessly writhing at her feet, blood trickling between his pale fingers as he clutches the ragged wreck of his shoulder. She falls to her knees in the warm spreading pool, and he rolls one agonized eye towards her, a perfect ring of terrified white visible around the yellow coin of his iris._

_ "Help…arm…" he chokes, and she realizes as always that his arm is there somewhere, under the sea of blood where he thrashes, if she can just find it and replace it. She plunges her hands into the roiling scarlet foam, and it coats her skin slick, like gloves glistening darkly up to her elbows; searching frantically, her fingers brush something like a hand and she grips it, pulls it to the surface—_

_ It gleams silver. Automail. Useless. She drops it, dives again, running her hands over things slimy and befouled under the splashing surface, hauling them up dripping, all grasping metal fingers and exposed wires and twitching mechanical joints and they can't save him, he needs his own flesh—_

_ Ed screams, and his leg is gone, ripping away with a sickening sucking noise to vanish beneath the surface with a ripple as she grabs for it. Blood splatters sickly-warm across her face, and she's thrashing her arms desperately in the frothing ocean of it, but she can't even reach the bottom anymore, it's rising up around them in mountainous waves like a vast stinking tide and she can't save him, she should have done more, she's floating away on a flood of his pain, clinging to him desperately as he rasps horrible noises and fights to breathe and _she can't save him…

* * *

Winry wakes with a hollow strangled gasp, sitting bolt upright in her chair. Heart hammering, she stares wildly around the bluish shadows of the hospital room, then slumps back in relief at the sight of his peacefully slumbering form.

_He's all right,_ she consoles herself, tempted to wake him, just to hear his sleepy irritated mumble. _Edward's just fine…_

_Well._ She has to qualify that statement, in light of the bandages plastered on him and the automail she'd fixed that day_. It wasn't my fault, he said it himself, the malfunction saved his life. Edward didn't die because of my failure, isn't _going_ to die because of it._

Still.

It's been a long time since she's had this nightmare. She can't help resting a hand on his shoulder, feeling for the reassuring pulse of life under his skin.

"You're safe now," she whispers, feeling as futile as one child comforting another in a thunderstorm. "I won't let you down again."


	83. Theme 83: With three years' eyes

**Theme 83 – With three years' eyes**

"A story?" Ed asked, giving Elysia Hughes a look of utmost disbelief. After years of study in the depths of alchemical tomes, wading through words whose meanings had to be sifted from the detritus of a thousand years…he was being asked to read a _bedtime story _to a _three-year-old girl? _

The book was pink. Its cover art involved a unicorn and a hyperthyroidal princess. It would take a deadly weapon to get him to open it, let alone read it aloud.

"Please?" mewed the deadly weapon herself, clambering up to park her cuddly little toddler bum in his lap.

Ed knew in that moment that his battle had been lost before it began.

Heaving a defeated sigh, he opened the book and began to read.

"'Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess with hair like golden—'"

"A toy doctor."

"What?"

Startled by the interruption, Ed looked down into limpid, adorable, totally demanding eyes. Elysia's chin was jutting stubbornly.

"A beautiful _toy doctor_," she repeated, impatiently. "The most beautifullest one ever."

Ed winced. There was no denying that face.

"Whatever," he gave in, bemused but obedient. "'A beautiful…toy doctor, with hair like golden wheat and eyes like a summer sky, beloved by all her subjects.'" What miserable tripe, he silently grumbled to himself. "'Tragically, it was foretold by the royal seer that a dragon would carry her off on her sixteenth birthday.'"

"How old is Winry?" Elysia asked suddenly.

"Almost sixteen," Edward said, wondering where this had come from.

Elysia looked thoughtful. "That's really old. How old are you?"

"We're the same age," Ed said, wondering when they would return to stupid sugarfluff and hoping the distraction would last. But Elysia's face cleared.

"Okay," she said, evidently satisfied. "Read more."

Completely confused by now, Ed obeyed. "'The fated eve arrived, and all the knights of the land assembled to defend their beloved prin—'"

"Toy doctor!" Elysia protested.

"Uh…'their beloved toy doctor. But the only one she cared for was the prince of—'"

"Alchemist."

"….._what?_"

Elysia gave him a look as if he was a hopeless idiot. "I want the story to be about an alchemist. Like my most favorite brothers."

That explained that. "But, the toy doctor…?"

"My _sister _is a toy doctor," Elysia cried, exasperated.

"But…you don't have a sister!" Ed protested.

A clank of metal and a chuckle announced Al's presence behind them.

"She means Winry, Brother," Al explained, amusement dancing in his eyes…

Everything suddenly clicked.

"HEY!" Ed howled, red-faced. "I am _not _playing Prince Charming to that grouchy, violent, pain-in-the-ass little tomboy—"

Elysia pouted and slid off his lap, pulling her book out of his hands. "You're too noisy, and you don't know _anything_. Mommy reads better'n you."

And with that, she toddled out of the room.

The brothers stared after her. Then Al coughed tactfully.

"Amazing what these three-year-olds will pick up on, isn't it?"

"Oh, shut up," Ed growled, and stormed away.

Al watched him go, and smiled inside.


	84. Theme 84: Things Left Undone

**Theme 84 – Things Left Undone**

There was sunlight draped all over the room when she went to wake Edward: pooling on the floor, puddled among the folds of the blanket where he'd kicked it to the foot of the bed as he slept, glinting off his automail, nestled in his hair. Framed in the wash of light from the window, the bed and the boy recumbent on it looked like something out of a classical painting, blankets trailing to the floor. About to shout him awake as usual, Winry stopped as if struck still, her hand pressed to the doorframe, arrested by the unexpected beauty of the moment.

When he shifted in his sleep, sighing faintly, the movement—instead of breaking the spell—only tilted his face toward her and into a sunbeam that suddenly gilded his eyelashes and brows, and limned his skin with a soft glow. A liquid trill of birdsong rolled in at the window, and Winry's heartbeat quickened, as she wondered why she'd never noticed he—

The breathless moment suddenly shattered into a fit of helpless, smothered giggles, as Winry realized that for a second there she'd been comparing Edward—sprawly, snore-inclined Edward, who kicked in his sleep and mumbled nonsense and dangled his limbs over the edge of the bed and drooled—to an illustration of a sleeping princess in a book of hers. If he'd been awake and aware of the thought, he would have tried to kick her in the shins for it.

Once her laughter had faded a bit, Winry walked to the side of the bed and gazed down at her friend's sleeping face. Up close, she had to admit, Edward was neither ethereal nor particularly feminine-looking. The square, stubborn jaw and slightly overlarge nose somewhat gave the game away. It had been a trick of light and shadow, she supposed; or just all that hair framing his face and catching the sun's rays. He left it loose for sleep, and it was spread across the pillow in soft blonde waves.

Hesitantly, Winry reached for his shoulder to shake him awake, then paused, dropping her fingers to rest lightly on that soft hair instead. She wasn't used to seeing it loose. Edward always tied it back with something. She'd never even realized quite how long it had gotten. Lightly, she combed her fingers through a lock, careful not to snag it on the rough callus of her fingers.

It made him look…different, left undone like that, she realized. Not feminine, but younger, softer, more innocent.

Maybe that was why he always tied it back, she thought, dryly. If anyone had a complex about appearing tough, it was Edward.

Shaking her head ruefully, Winry disengaged her fingers from Ed's hair and set about nudging him awake. She would not—absolutely not!—tell him any of the things she'd thought on seeing his hair undone. He'd never let her see it loose again, if she did.

And that, she reflected as Ed began to frown and grumble himself awake, would be a real tragedy.


	85. Theme 85: Parents

**Theme 85 – Parents**

The doorbell rang, a musical double-note, and Sara Rockbell breathed a sigh of relief as her three-month-old daughter's howls faded for the moment. Winry had been refusing to sleep normal hours since the move, and walking her around the house until she quieted was getting old.

Hurrying across the kitchen, Sara threw open the door to a blast of December air.

"Thanks for the distraction," she said breathlessly, pushing her wavy brown hair out of her face and doing her best to smile warmly. "Winry loves the doorbell, I'd ring it all day if it wouldn't be just as…"

Her voice trailed off, as she realized that her visitor was for once not another crotchety farmer coming to call on their prodigal local boy and meet his new wife and baby, but a young woman about her own age, with soft green eyes and long hair dusted with snow, wrapped in an enormous men's overcoat.

Winry waved a damp fist at the newcomer and whimpered faintly. The woman smiled, offering a finger to her; Winry clamped her little hand around it and promptly tried to put it in her mouth.

"She's got a good grip," the woman said approvingly, straightening up to smile at her new neighbor. "I'm Trisha Elric, from down the road. You must be Sara. I've heard a lot about you…"

Sara flushed. "People keep telling me that."

"Urey's been bragging you up for years," Trisha assured her.

"Typical Urey," Sara said, rolling her eyes fondly. "Listen, it's freezing out here. Why don't you come in for a cup of tea?"

Trisha's face brightened, and she followed her inside with more familiarity than Sara felt yet in her husband's childhood home, shrugging off the outsized overcoat. As the thick folds of fabric came off, Sara saw the silhouette underneath and stopped in her tracks, her mouth forming a delighted 'o'.

She had a sister here after all.

"Oh, my goodness," she said, smiling down at the heavy swell of her new neighbor's stomach. "Just a few weeks to go…unless that's twins."

Trisha laughed and shook her head. "No, thank goodness. Just one, for now."

"Believe me, one is more than enough to start out with. You hear that?" she added to her daughter. "You're going to have a friend to play with!" And I'll have one, too, she thought gratefully.

Playfully, Sara held out Winry to let her little hands rest on Trisha's stomach. "Say hello, Winry," she instructed. Trisha giggled, delighted with the baby's tiny fingers…

"Umph!" she exclaimed suddenly, her eyes widening. "Hey!"

"What?" Sara asked, startled. "Are you alright?"

"He's got a wicked kick," Trisha explained, ruefully patting her stomach. "It's hard to sleep, sometimes. I suppose that was a hello?"

Sara chuckled. "How polite of him…or her," she corrected herself, gathering her daughter back into her arms.

"Now, don't you go kicking back someday, young lady," she warned Winry. "I think this should be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."


	86. Theme 86: Unconscious

**Theme 86 – Unconscious**

There may have been a time when Edward liked dreaming, but it's long past. He has the sense to realize that an addiction to sleeping pills would be neither healthy nor a guarantee against it, but if there was a harmless drug he could swallow to smooth every night out into blissful blank nothingness from the moment his eyes closed until the moment they opened, he would take it nightly without a second thought.

Like any hatred which really boils down to a fear, he makes excuses to himself. Dreams are a waste of time, he insists to his unconscious as he lies uneasily down for the night. The idea behind sleeping is to rest, isn't it? Then what's the point, if the minute you drift off, you're suddenly standing in a circus tent in the middle of Yolk Island, trying to build a go cart with your scary ex-alchemy master?

Logic doesn't work on the unconscious, though, particularly when it's built on lies. Transmuting a toy with Izumi is not the kind of dream that fostered Ed's aversion. His vivid imagination has far more dank and fertile grounds of memory to sow seeds in, and they come up in a jungle of screaming dead faces and looming golden doors, gasping jaws and trembling bloody exposed ribs with a slender arm beckoning above them, his mother's face and his brother's disintegrating body swimming through the dream-ethers to beg him to try again, or to never have tried at all.

Those dreams have been familiar fare since he was eleven, making the sensation of lunging up out of sleep with the sheets tangled sweaty around him nearly as familiar as the feeling of a normal drifting into wakefulness. It's only more recently that new flowers have started blooming in his dream-jungle.

The other night, for example, when he found himself running in the familiar black void, crying out for someone—and a voice began to cry back, the darkness peeling away until suddenly warm arms wrapped round his waist with a press of yielding heat against his back and a whisper over his shoulder, _I'm here…_

Or, hideously embarrassing, sitting in the old wooden chair in the Rockbells' workroom with Winry kneeling next to him, telling him insistently that he had to take his clothes off so that she could fix his automail; himself arguing angrily that he'd never had to take them _all _off before and he damn well wasn't doing it in front of her, if she'd developed a sudden thing for stripping she could do it herself—and then in the sudden blindsiding way of dreams she'd laughed and said, "Fine," and he'd blinked and then she…

Dreams, Edward knows from something he'd once read, are your mind's unconscious way of telling you things you haven't fully figured out on your own. He finds himself not wanting to think too hard about what they're telling him now.

* * *

_A special note of thanks to Mitch Hedberg, whose comedy routine on dreams was the inspiration for part of this theme._


	87. Theme 87: Change

**Theme 87 – Change**

Ed's not one for domesticity, but he promised to help with dinner today and all that teasing from Al about broken promises is starting to itch. So he's making pasta, because it's easy. He hates spaghetti, long and clammy and slithery, but he can deal with its various cousins, so tonight's fare is tiny bowties.

The Rockbells' gas stove is a new invention, and the blue flame fascinates him on a little-boy level, so he turns it as high as it'll go under the heavy pot of water. He's bored, of course, because easy cooking is never particularly interesting, but the flickering ring of fire is something to watch, at first. He's just about to lose interest in it, too, when he notices the little bubbles forming all over the inside curve of the pot.

Curiously, he scrapes the tip of the stirring spoon through them, making a trail of bare black iron, then another. Smiling, he writes his name in the bubbles, then Al's, then Winry's. He's got nothing better to do at the moment, so he settles down watching, to see how long it takes for the new-forming bubbles to encroach on the space.

With the gas flame roaring against the bottom of the pot, it doesn't take long for the bubbles to multiply and swell. Formulas for heat conduction and maps of water molecules humming in his head, Ed watches fascinated as they reach fisheye size, nudging and clamoring and crowding each other until they begin to rush up the side of the pot in streaks, then in droves. The surface quivers like an earthquake beginning, shakes and rolls and starts to froth up into a real rollicking boil…

It's strangely fascinating, like major alchemy in progress, or some grand natural phenomena, another solar eclipse maybe; he feels almost privileged to be watching, caught up in a moment of childlike wonder.

Coming into the kitchen to check on his progress, Winry finds him peering into the pot of water like a cat stalking a fishbowl, and laughs.

"A watched pot never boils, you know," she says, nudging him as she walks past.

He smirks, pointing to the hissing water. "It does when I'm watching."

Looking at him, with a rare sunny infectious grin beaming all over his face, his cheeks flushed from the steam and strands of buttery-gold hair coming loose from his ponytail to trail down his neck, she can understand the pot's motivation.


	88. Theme 88: Point of View

**Theme 88 – Point of View**

He wasn't really what you'd call handsome and she knew it full well. They say it's all in your point of view, beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that, and your typical beholder would certainly give him a second look…but on that second glance, simple facts inevitably became apparent.

His face was too angular, sharp-featured, its range of expressions elastic and often bordering on comical; and while he was slowly growing into that prow of a nose, the prow of a nose was also—stubbornly—slowly growing. The brilliant hazel-gold of his eyes was remarkable, but a little unsettling; his mouth, though expressive, was too wide for classical good looks, and always hanging open at one thing or another, in sleep or boredom or surprise.

He was gradually getting taller, and his build was an appealing one, sturdy and long-legged and muscular, just starting to expand into broad adult shoulders and hands; but he was skinny from years of eating for two; and the weight of his automail had twisted his growing young body, deforming his pectoral and the muscles of his thigh, putting a slight permanent tilt on his hips, spreading long ragged pink stretch marks across his skin where the securing bolts pulled.

Striking, yes-his wasn't a face you'd easily forget-but handsome, no.

And yet. The eye of one particular beholder knew every line of that angular face, and had watched him wrinkle that nose at milk and chores when it was a childish snub; she'd seen tears gather unshed in those eyes and knew by heart the smiles tucked into the corners of that mouth. She understood what he'd sacrificed for his brother, and why; she'd driven in those bolts, and seen the fiery intensity and determination that burned under every inch of scarred skin.

Was it any wonder that, to her, he was beautiful?


	89. Theme 89: Parting gift

**Theme 89 – Parting gift**

_15__Jun 14 – Goddammit he's done it again. Had the nerve to call me up and ask me to haul my stuff all the way out to Central to fix my poor arm. Yes, my arm. I refuse to call it his anymore, all he does is smash it to bits._

…_I hope he's okay._

* * *

_17 Jun 14 – What the crap did he do to my arm?! Dug it apart down to the frame and can't find anything broken, except for crack in casing and salt deposits on internal workings. Wiring is cooked, though. Saline damage? When's he been to the ocean lately?_

* * *

_Asked Al about ocean. They got sent to coast to investigate groundwater contamination. Casing cracked in fall down rockslide, got full of seawater, STUPID IDIOT! Could have been killed._

_Will have to replace most of damaged parts on rush order. Am definitely charging extra. Might squeeze some sense out of him._

* * *

_19 Jun 14 – That Idiot trying to bribe me again. Thought he was done with that when we were twelve. Bought me 1 pair blue agate earrings, told me they match my eyes. Suspect he was coached by Al, as immediately ruined effect by adding he would kick me if got more holes punched for them. Am tempted to do it just to spite him._

* * *

_20 Jun 14 – Dropped new earring down sink drain by accident. Don't care. Who wants stupid earrings anyway?_

_ Ed's automail almost fixed. Time to go home soon._

* * *

_ He found out about the earring. Transmuted a hole in the pipe and got it out. Earring was filthy so he cleaned it too._

_ Not sure what to say._

* * *

_21 Jun 14 – Heading home. Ed and Al saw me off at train station. Got Ed to pay out the nose for his repairs, so Granny should be pleased. He's got enough research funds, it's not unfair of us…_

_ He hugged me goodbye. Just up and grabbed me. Dumbass. I about died of surprise. Don't know what was in his coffee this morning but it needs to be made illegal._

_ First time he's hugged me since we were kids._

_It felt…warm._

_ Train's too loud to think right now. Figure this out later. Time for a hard-earned nap._


	90. Theme 90: I want to have

**Theme 90 – I want to have…**

Two rooms away, Edward hears a faint bump and a clatter.

There was a time when this wouldn't have bothered him, but something seems to have changed in his head on an almost chemical level since his son was born. Slamming his book, Edward shoves back his chair and rushes out of his study, heart thumping.

The kitchen is a disaster. Ed stops in the doorway to simply appreciate the havoc a two-year-old can wreak in seconds: the open icebox, the spreading white puddle, the empty glass bottle rocking gently on its side, the little smeary footprints.

"Theo?" he says, and his son stops his prodigious efforts to climb the kitchen drawer handles and turns around, revealing denim overalls soaked through with milk.

"Oops?" he says, making his golden eyes as wide and innocent as he can.

He's a precocious kid. Edward has to hand him that.

"Winry!" he shouts, and the disciplinarian of the house chooses that moment to burst in, wiping her greasy hands on a rag and looking harassed.

"I just left him for a minute," she exclaims. "Oh, Theo, _no!_ You know better than that! Oh, thank god it didn't break…"

"It had to be the milk," Edward laments. "Why did it have to be the milk? Betrayed by my own child…"

"You're joking, right?" Winry is wetting a dishtowel in the sink. "He's exactly like you. Aren't you, y'little piggy?" Crouching to wipe off their issue's face, she makes little pig-snuffling noises at him and is rewarded with a fit of giggles.

"Oh, ha." Edward, cross-armed and cross-faced as he leans against the icebox, is not amused by his wife's raillery. "Ha, ha. Think you're clever, don't you."

"What? You Elrics are terrible at waiting for anything you want."

He hates to admit it, but she has a point. And even with grease smears on her cheeks, making barnyard noises at their(!) sticky, giggling two-year-old, Winry is inexpressibly beautiful. In some ways, she's more beautiful than ever.

Anything he wants?

He blurts it without meaning to. "How about another kid?"

"Just as soon as you learn to help clean," Winry calmly replies, without looking up or missing a beat. "Lazy bum. Who's a lazy bum, Theo?" she coos at their son, unsnapping his spoiled overalls. "Daddy is!"

There was a time when Edward could have transmuted the mess off the floor with a swift clap. Instead, he walks to the sink, grabs a damp rag and gets down on his knees to start scrubbing.

Winry stares. Then, she smiles. "I walked right into that one, didn't I?"

"It's almost somebody's naptime," he points out.

The look, the _smile_ she gives him then…god, this is why it took him so long to get the words out in the first place. Tongue-tied doesn't begin to cover it.

"Alright, Ed," she says, laughing. "Come on, Theo, let's get you changed. Naptime soon."

Edward Elric scrubs as if his life depends on it.


End file.
